Instagram wants to be known as the beautiful social network. Instagram feeds all over the world are filled with post after post from seemingly perfect users, celebrities, and so-called influencers. There are literally millions of these types of user on Instagram and it looks like a lot of contact data relating to this exact subset of Instagram user has just been leaked.
Contact data for over 49 million Instagram users has been exposed online
A report by TechCrunch shows that an unprotected database of well-known and high-profile Instagram accounts has been leaked online. The database was hosted by Amazon Web Services and included private and personal data including email addresses and even phone numbers.
The interesting thing about all this is that the leaked database does not actually come from inside Instagram. The open database was discovered by a security researcher called Anurag Sen who then told TechCrunch about his discovery. After a bit of digging, the media outlet then traced it back to Chtrbox, a marketing company in Mumbai.
Chtrbox is one of the many companies around the world that pays Instagram influencers to publish sponsored posts for their followers to see. As well as containing email addresses and phone numbers, the database also included information about the users’ Instagram accounts, including number of followers and the overall reach of their account. Chtrbox had also given each account a monetary value, showing how much they were worth in marketing terms. The firm will no doubt have used this information to decide how much to pay an influencer for a certain campaign.
According to Instagram HQ, this type of datamining is prohibited on the network. Speaking to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for the Facebook-owned app said, “We’re looking into the issue to understand if the data described – including email and phone numbers – was from Instagram or from other sources… We’re also inquiring with Chtrbox to understand where this data came from and how it became publicly available.” The app is clearly trying to distance itself from culpability on this one.
This isn’t the first time, however, that Instagram or Facebook has been exposed by leaks like this one. A couple of years ago, Instagram was hit by a similar data scraping issue when details from over six million accounts were leaked online. Recently, it was just a couple of months ago when hundreds of millions of passwords were found unencrypted on an internal server at Facebook. When news of the recent breach first broke Facebook originally claimed that it was only a few thousand Instagram passwords that had leaked. It later had to confirm, however, that the true number was actually in the millions.
