At least 235 million users of Facebook-owned Instagram, China-based TikTok and Google-owned YouTube have been hit by a massive scraped and leaked data.
Scraped data is a form of technique called web scraping that collects data from web pages in an automated manner. Web scraping is not illegal but social media companies restrict this practice to protect user data. Such data is usually used for spam and phishing campaigns.
In this scraped data from the four websites information like profile name, full name, profile photo, age, gender and follower statistics have been collected.
"The data was spread across several datasets and the most significant being two coming in at just under 100 million each and containing profile records scraped from Instagram," reports Forbes quoting security researchers Comparitech who further added, "An unsecured database was behind the data breach".
