A new investigation has found that the information of more than 214 million Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn social media users worldwide was stored on an unsecured server in China owned by Chinese social media management company Socialarks.
According to a report provided by SafetyDetectives cybersecurity management company, about 2 million Australians are among the 214 million global social media users, with screenshots that appear to show details of some Facebook users in most Australian states and territories, including phone numbers, emails that are not publicly displayed on social media, and other public information, according to Australia’s Nine News. information that is not publicly displayed on social media and other public information.
This means that anyone with the server’s IP address can access the database, which contains the private information of more than 200 million people.
Anurag Sen, lead researcher at SafetyDetectives, said his team searching for online vulnerabilities was able to access more than 400GB of data and more than 318 million records on Stupid Bird Social’s servers, which “was completely unsecured …… without password protection or encryption.”
“From the compromised data we found, it was possible to determine people’s full names, countries of residence, places of work, job titles, user data and contact information, as well as direct links to their profiles.” He said.
He said the data could be accessed by criminals and used for identity fraud or to target people for scams.
While the data collection is not illegal, it violates the terms of these large social media companies.
Alaistair MacGibbon, a former national cybersecurity consultant and head of the Australian Cyber Information Centre (ACSC), told NineNews.com that users who submit personal information do not like this mass collection of data and want the information they submit to be used by the site only for the original (and confirmed to be reasonable user) purpose.
Technology and cybersecurity expert Trevor Long said this is one of the largest data collection repositories he has ever seen, and the risk of bringing together such a variety of information in one place is something people don’t often see.
According to the company’s official webpage, it can “use its own global buyer and contact NPC data to intelligently recommend the most matching high-quality buyer resources for enterprises” and “capture the intentional behavior of potential customers through a network-wide tracking system, recommending sales leads and facilitating fast transactions.
The company is headquartered in Shenzhen, and also has more than ten directly managed cities such as Beijing, Xiamen and Shanghai.
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