Data Breaching on Social Media Networks

Through this article, we will take a look at the 10 most significant incidents of Data Breach in the past decade which have had a major impact on the security of some of the most famous social media platforms. So, here is the list of the ten biggest incidents of data breaching in recent history where the security of these social media platforms were breached by cybercriminals time and time again.

List of top 10 Data Breaching incidents on social media platforms

Following are the top 10 data breaching incidents that have happened in recent times on various social media networking platforms.

1) Facebook Data Breaching

Two Facebook business datasets were made available to a public website in April 2019 including information like mobile numbers, account names, and Facebook IDs pertained to more than 530 million users of Facebook social networking platform.

This incident was also repeated two years later in April 2021 and security experts suggested that there was a fresh criminal intent associated with it.

2) Yahoo Data Breaching

Yahoo, which was the victim of an attack in the year 2014 in addition to the one in the year 2013 is making second entry on this list. In this incident, data of over 500 million people was stolen which had sensitive information like names, phone numbers, email addresses, encrypted passwords, and date of births.

The company started taking corrective action in 2014, but it wasn’t until a stolen database started to sell on the black market in 2016 which forced Yahoo to reveal this incident in public.

3) Adobe Data Breaching

Adobe revealed that hackers had acquired login information for an unknown number of user accounts and about three million encrypted customer payment card records at the beginning of October 2013. A thorough investigation over several weeks revealed that the theft had also compromised customer names, passwords, debit and credit card information.

As a solution, a settlement for alleged violations of the Customer Records Act and unfair commercial practices was agreed upon in August 2015, in which Adobe was forced to pay $1.1 million in legal fees as well as an undisclosed amount to customers.

4) LinkedIn Data Breaching

In 2012, LinkedIn disclosed that 6.5 million random passwords had been taken by hackers and uploaded on a Russian hacker forum, resulting in a data breach. However, the entire scope of the incident wasn’t made public until 2016.

The email addresses and passwords of around 165 million LinkedIn members were discovered to be being sold by the same hacker who was selling the My Space data for just 5 bitcoins (approximately $2,000 at the time). LinkedIn stated that it had changed the passwords for the impacted accounts after becoming aware of the intrusion.

5) Sine Weibo Data Breaching

Sine Weibo is one of China’s biggest social media networks, with more than 600 million users. An attacker accessed a portion of the company’s database in March 2020, affecting 538 million Weibo users’ personal information, including real names, site usernames, gender, location, and phone numbers. The attacker is reported to have sold that database for $250 on a clandestine network.

6) Dub smash Data Breach

Dub smash, a video messaging service based in New York, had 162 million email addresses, usernames, PBKDF2 password hashes, and other personal information like birth dates stolen in December 2018. All of this information was later listed for sale on the Dream Market dark web market in December 2019.

In addition to offering guidance on password changes, Dub smash confirmed the breach and information selling that had taken place. However, they didn’t clarify how the attackers gained access or to validate the number of users that were impacted.

7) NetEase Data Breaching

Email addresses and unencrypted passwords for 235 million accounts belonging to NetEase, a supplier of mailbox services through websites like 163.com and 126.com, were purportedly sold by dark web marketplace vendor Double Flag in October 2015. However, NetEase has insisted that there was no data breach.

8) Friend Finder Data Breaching

In October 2016, hackers stole six databases containing 20 years’ worth of user data from the adult-focused social networking service Friend Finder Network. The breach of more than 414 million accounts’ names, email addresses, and passwords had the potential to be particularly devastating for victims given the sensitive nature of the services provided by the company.

And by the time a website LeakedSource.com published its study of the data set on November 14, 2016, 99% of the passwords that had been revealed had been cracked. They had been hashed using the notoriously flawed SHA-1 method.

9) Myspace Data Breach

The social media platform Myspace made headlines in 2016 even though it had long since stopped being the dominant force it once was after the information of 360 million of its user accounts got leaked onto LeakedSource.com and offered for sale on the dark web market The Real Deal for a price of 6 bitcoin (roughly $3,000 at the time).

Email addresses, passwords, and usernames for some accounts that were created prior to June 11, 2013 on the old Myspace platform were among the information that the business claims was lost.

10) Toabao Data Breach

A developer for an affiliate marketer used his own crawler software to collect user information from the Alibaba Chinese shopping website Taobao over the course of eight months, including usernames and mobile numbers. Although both the developer and his company received a 3-year prison sentence, it appears that they were only gathering the data for their personal purposes and not for sale on the black market.

Conclusion

In light of the aforementioned data breach incidents, we may conclude this article by saying that a data breach can have an immediate impact on hundreds of millions or possibly billions of individuals in the data-driven world of today. As a result of attackers taking advantage of people’s everyday reliance on data, digital transformation has increased the amount of moving data and scaled up data breaches accordingly.

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