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Instagram data breach: Data of millions of influencers exposed online, leak traced to India
The database exposed online not only contains details such as the phone number and email IDs of the Instagram influencers but also other details such as their profile pictures, bio, their total number of followers and even the location data (city and country). Security researcher Anurag Sen told Tech Crunch that the database that was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was left without a password, which allowed anyone to take a peek inside it and see the information pertaining to the Instagram influencers available in it.
What's more astonishing as that as many as 49 million records had been exposed online.
Upon investgation, the blog traced the database back to a Mumbai-based social media marketing firm, Chtrbox that pays Instagram influencers to run ad campaigns on their accounts. The investigation also revealed that the records exposed online inturn contained a record that calculated the net worth of Instagram influencers based on their followers, reach of their post, engagement and the number of likes and shares they had.
Instagram data breach: Data of millions of influencers exposed online, leak traced to India
The leaked database contains information such as phone number, email IDs of the Instagram influencers, profile pictures, bio, their total number of followers and even their location data.
Instagram is in news again and this time for exposing the personal data of millions of influencers online. A massive database containing contact information of Instagram influencers, brands and celebrities has been exposed online.
The database exposed online not only contains details such as the phone number and email IDs of the Instagram influencers but also other details such as their profile pictures, bio, their total number of followers and even the location data (city and country). Security researcher Anurag Sen told Tech Crunch that the database that was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) was left without a password, which allowed anyone to take a peek inside it and see the information pertaining to the Instagram influencers available in it.
What's more astonishing as that as many as 49 million records had been exposed online.
Upon investgation, the blog traced the database back to a Mumbai-based social media marketing firm, Chtrbox that pays Instagram influencers to run ad campaigns on their accounts. The investigation also revealed that the records exposed online inturn contained a record that calculated the net worth of Instagram influencers based on their followers, reach of their post, engagement and the number of likes and shares they had.
This information was then used by the social media marketing firm to determine how much amount it had to pay to influencers for running an ad on their Instagram channels.
While Chatrbox has not commented on the matter yet, it has pulled the database offline. Facebook, the company that owns the popular photo-sharing site, on the other hand said that it is investigating the matter. "We're looking into the issue to understand if the data described - including email and phone numbers - was from Instagram or from other sources...We're also inquiring with Chtrbox to understand where this data came from and how it became publicly available," Instagram said in a statement to the US based media channels.
If you are worried that details of your Instagram account too might have been exposed online, then you need not to worry as the breach did not occur via Instagram servers but via a social media marketing firm. And so, if you are not an influencer you have nothing to worry about.
Notably, the latest leak comes nearly two years after a bug allowed hackers to obtain phone numbers and email addresses of nearly 6 million Instagram users, including celebrities like Selena Gomez and Jennifer Lopez, and started selling this information for bitcoin. Months later, Instagram chocked off developers by restricting the amount of information they could extract from the Instagram API.
Separately, a report last month revealed that Facebook had accidentally stored passwords of millions of Instagram users in plain text, which left the information exposed to the people who had access to the company's internal systems. The social media giant later confirmed that this information had not been abused internally and that it had notified the affected users.
While Chatrbox has not commented on the matter yet, it has pulled the database offline. Facebook, the company that owns the popular photo-sharing site, on the other hand said that it is investigating the matter. "We're looking into the issue to understand if the data described - including email and phone numbers - was from Instagram or from other sources...We're also inquiring with Chtrbox to understand where this data came from and how it became publicly available," Instagram said in a statement to the US based media channels.
If you are worried that details of your Instagram account too might have been exposed online, then you need not to worry as the breach did not occur via Instagram servers but via a social media marketing firm. And so, if you are not an influencer you have nothing to worry about.
Notably, the latest leak comes nearly two years after a bug allowed hackers to obtain phone numbers and email addresses of nearly 6 million Instagram users, including celebrities like Selena Gomez and Jennifer Lopez, and started selling this information for bitcoin. Months later, Instagram chocked off developers by restricting the amount of information they could extract from the Instagram API.
Separately, a report last month revealed that Facebook had accidentally stored passwords of millions of Instagram users in plain text, which left the information exposed to the people who had access to the company's internal systems. The social media giant later confirmed that this information had not been abused internally and that it had notified the affected users.
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