Yet again we have to deal with another data breach. And yet again it involves some of the most well know companies.
Facebook, its subsidiary Instagram and LinkedIn are all victims of the latest data theft. So how bad was it? Social-media management company Socialarks got hit to the tune of more than 408GB of personal data from around 214 million Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn users worldwide. According to researches from Safety Detectives that adds up to about 318 million individual records.
But its not as bad as you might think. First of all your passwords and financial data appear to be safe…for now. And the data that was stolen is information you share anyway. This includes;
- Your full name
- Phone numbers and email addressees
- Usernames
- Profile pictures
- Like/Follower counts
- Job title
- Connected social media account names (on LinkedIn)
Socialarks built its database by scraping public information from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These companies frown upon this practice and have very stringent policies against the practice for this very reason.
But according to Safety Detectives this information still was not publicly available. And this is concerning.
“However, according to our findings, Socialarks’ database stored personal data for Instagram and LinkedIn users such as private phone numbers and email addresses for users that did not divulge such information publicly on their accounts. How Socialarks could possibly have access to such data in the first place remains unknown.
Also, the fact that such a large, active, and data-rich database was left completely unsecured (probably for a second time) is astonishing.”
Unfortunately there is not a a lot you can do about the breach. Good advice would be to check “HaveIBeepwned” to see if the information shows up. You can also use Facebook’s Privacy Checkup tool to get an idea what you may be sharing that you may not have known. And use LinkedIn’s privacy tool to view your public profile and quickly adjust anything you’re sharing on it.
