The security research team at Comparitech today disclosed how an unsecured database left almost 235 million Instagram, TikTok and YouTube user profiles exposed online in what can only be described as a massive data leak. The data was spread across several datasets; the most significant being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records apparently scraped from Instagram. The third-largest was a dataset of some 42 million TikTok users, followed by just under 4 million YouTube user profiles. There is no confirmed source for this leaked data at the moment, but researchers suggest that the evidence pointed to a company called Deep Social that was banned by both Facebook and Instagram in 2018 after scraping user profile data.
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