A database containing almost 235 million social media profiles of users from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube has been exposed because it wasn’t password-protected.
Evidence suggests that much of the data originally came from a now-defunct company: Deep Social. The names of the Instagram datasets (accounts-deepsocial-90 and accounts-deepsocial-91) hint at the data’s origin. Based on this, [security researcher Bob] Diachenko first contacted Deep Social using the email address listed on its website to disclose the exposure. The administrators of Deep Social forwarded the disclosure to Social Data. The CTO of Social Data acknowledged the exposure, and the servers hosting the data were taken down about three hours later.