A cloud misconfig by SocialArks exposed 318 million records gleaned from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
More than 400GB of public and private profile data for 214 million social-media users from around the world has been exposed to the internet – including details for celebrities and social-media influencers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The leak stems from a misconfigured ElasticSearch database owned by Chinese social-media management company SocialArks, which contained personally identifiable information (PII) from users of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms, according to researchers at Safety Detectives.
The server was found to be publicly exposed without password protection or encryption during routine IP-address checks on potentially unsecured databases, researchers said. It contained more than 318 million records in total.