The leaked database was discovered on Shodan on May 14th.
A huge online database containing private contact information including phone numbers and email IDs of roughly 50 million Instagram profiles including those of influencers and brands has reportedly been discovered by security researcher Anurag Sen.
The affected individuals include famous food bloggers and celebrities too apart from social media influencers. This database, which belongs to Chtrbox reportedly contains 49 million records was hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and got exposed because it wasn’t protected with a password.
Chtrbox is a Mumbai-based marketing firm that connects social media influencers to brands looking to market their products.
See: Facebook: Storing Instagram passwords in plain text & harvesting your emails
Every single record in the exposed database contains data belonging to social media influencers’ accounts and in some cases, even the account location is also mentioned. Each account has different worth depending on the number of followers, reachability, and engagement on the platform.
Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch contacted Chtrbox to inform about the exposed database, and it was eventually removed. It must be noted that Anurag claimed to discover the exposed database on Shodan on May 14th but in a statement issued by Chtrbox stated that the database was only exposed for 72 hours and contained no personal data.
Whittaker also tweeted on Chtrbox’s statement and called it “inaccurate.”
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