While this year was full of new techs and amazing development worldwide it also was an eye-opener as the data leak cases were quite high. People use the internet and services from apps and websites without knowing what they are giving them as a user. Most of the tech companies and service providers are harvesting user data for some time now. Many examples of such things were out in public this year leading to the passing of different privacy acts. Now a new Data leak is found and this one is huge that covers more than 1.2 billion people related to the different records.
It is nothing new to know that there is selling and buying of data records going on all the time on Dark web. This Database was also discovered from Dark Web by security researchers that found this huge database exposing such a large number of people. Bob Diachenko and Vinny Troia found this database with 650 million email addresses, 1 billion Facebook URLs and IDs, 420 million Linkedin URLs and millions of mobile numbers. Its one of the biggest data records found exposing such a large number of people and it is also a reminder of privacy issues in the digital world.
This was a huge discovery that was made but the source and owner of this database are not known as this was publicly available. The fact that this was available on Dar Web makes it more unclear on how the data or records were occupied as it can be a data breach or simply data leak. It doesn’t really mean that someone has weak security that couldn’t secure the user’s personal data. The record included different types of personal information like phone numbers, emails, URLs and IDs, etc from different websites and could be done by some group or hacker over by long term data collection.