SocialArks exposed 318 million records from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn in a misconfig of the cloud. Details for social-media influencers and celebrities from the U.S were among the public and personal profile data exposed. An ElasticSearch database owned by a Chinese social-media company, SocialArks, was misconfigured leading to the leak.
The server was found to be exposed without password protection or encryption during a routine IP-address check-up on potentially unsecured databases. The platform SocialArks manages data to produce advertising and marketing. The database works to solve the problems of marketing and social customer management in China’s foreign trade industry. The data that was leaked was “scraped” from social media platforms for marketing purposes, both private and public information. It is unclear how the database accessed private information from social media users.
Read more: Millions of Social Profiles Leaked by Chinese Data-Scrapers
