Instagram Data Leak: Chtrbox leaks data of 50M Instagram users

Data breaches and leaks are common in today’s society with something new happening almost every other day. This time its an Instagram Data Leak and responsible party is an Indian Company based out of Mumbai caused the leak of almost 50 million Instagram users that mostly include celebrities or high profile individuals also known as Influencers.

The Instagram Data Leak was first discovered on an unprotected Amazon Web Services (AWS) server by a security researcher Anurag Sen who first reported it to TechCrunch . Apparently the data was kept there by Chtrbox and was used by them to calculate the net worth of these individuals and contact them with certain marketing offers.

The database is said to have included public information such as number of followers, like and shares but also private data which includes email addresses, phone numbers and even locations of users.

For those of you who don’t know, Chatrbox is a marketing firm that helps these influencers connect with brands and get them sponsorship.

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.

A spokesperson for Facebook said about the incident.

Chtrbox is yet to release a statement on this data breach and explain why it kept all that data.

However, the concerning thing is not just the company having that data but how it got that data in the first place. Instagram that is owned by Facebook claims that no data is shared with any third-parties and is kept confidential. This isn’t the first time that private user data that is owned by Facebook has been leaked. In the past few years there have been several occasions of data breach at Facebook’s end. The most recent one being just about a month ago when UpGaurd revealed that data of millions of Facebook users could be found of some third-party Amazon servers.

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