San Francisco: At least 235 million users of Facebook-owned Instagram, China-based TikTok and Google-owned YouTube have been hit by a massive data leak and their profiles were up for grabs on the Dark Web.
According to security researchers from the pro-consumer website Comparitech, an unsecured database was behind this data breach.
"The data was spread across several datasets and the most significant being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records scraped from Instagram," reports Forbes, quoting the security researchers.
The third-largest was a dataset of some 42 million TikTok users, followed by nearly 4 million YouTube user profiles.
One in five records contained either a telephone number or email address of the users, along with profile name, full real name, profile photo, account description and several followers and likes, etc.
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"The information would probably be most valuable to spammers and cybercriminals running phishing campaigns," said Paul Bischoff, Editor at Comparitech.
"Even though the data is publicly accessible, the fact that it was leaked in aggregate as a well-structured database makes it much more valuable than each profile would be in isolation," Bischoff said in the report on Thursday.