Instagram suffered a major leak of personal data of popular profiles and celebrities

The TechCrunch server brought information last night about a huge information leak that affected the Instagram social network. According to security experts, several million users were compromised, mainly from among big influencers, celebrities and otherwise very active accounts. The information database was freely available on the web, without any security.

According to foreign information, the leak affected several million Instagram profiles. The leaked database contained almost 50 million records, from relatively harmless usernames, account information (bio) to relatively problematic records such as e-mail, phone number or real address. In addition, the database was constantly growing, and even after the publication of the first information about the leak, it was seen that new and new records appeared in it. The database was stored on AWS, without a single security element, so it was available to anyone who knew about it.

While trying to track down the possible source of the leak, security experts reached out to Chtrbox, a company based in Mumbai, India. This company takes care of paying influencers to promote selected products. Thanks to this, the leaked database contained information about the "value" of all profiles. This value was intended to quantify the degree of reach of each Instagram profile, given the number of fans, the level of interaction and other parameters. This information was then used to evaluate how much companies should pay influencers to promote products.

The strange thing about the whole situation is that the database also got information about users who never cooperated with Chtrbox. Company representatives did not comment on the leak, but they have already removed the database from the website. Instagram management is aware of the issue and is currently trying to determine the cause of the leak. In the last two years, this is already the umpteenth massive leak of personal data originating from Instagram. Even so, the popularity of the platform continues to grow.

Source: TechCrunch