SOCIAL

The social media sites that have lost the most user data…ever

Published

2 years ago

October 20, 2022

The social media sites that have lost the most user data...ever

Photo: — © Karen Bleier, AFP

Social media sites are the top website type to be targeted by a cyberattack, with over 2,000 cyber-attacks taking place everyday day. So, what sites have been victims of the most data breaches & what sites are losing the most user data?

The company Proxyrack has revealed which social media sites have had the most data breaches, lost the most user data, and used search volumes to reveal which sites people are most concerned about scams on.

The outcome of the analysis is shown in the table below.

Social Media sites that have lost the most user data

Rank	Social Media Platform	Number of Users Impacted by Data Breaches
1	Yahoo!	3,502,910,847
2	Facebook	2,108,458,528
3	LinkedIn	1,056,457,960
4	Myspace	719,420,698
5	Sina Weibo	538,000,000
6	Twitter	369,582,583
7	Quora	100,000,000
8	Dailymotion	85,000,000
9	Tumblr	65,469,298
10	Instagram	49,000,000

Here, Yahoo! comes out on top, with its total number of users affected is over 3.5 billion. The majority of this figure is made up of the 2013 breach, which was initially thought to have exposed 1 billion users’ data.

A further metric is with sites that have suffered from data breaches. Cyber criminals are well versed in tricking social media users to hand over their sensitive information, stealing personal data, and gaining unauthorized access to users’ private accounts. In addition, the configuration of many sites leaves them vulnerable to attack.

Social Media sites with the most data breaches:

Rank	Social Media Platform	Data Breaches
1	Facebook	8
2	LinkedIn	4
2	Twitter	4
2	Yahoo!	4
5	Myspace	3

The categories of data commonly stored and therefore data that is vulnerable includes:

Information in the public profile: name, location, etc.
Contact information: email addresses and sometimes phone numbers.
Uploaded content: such as public posts, private DM messages, photos, and videos.
Usage data based on what links you interact with (links to the platform and from the platform).
Data on which devices are linked to which accounts (phone, tablet, computer)
Facial recognition data.
Metadata on where and when people log in or use a platform

In top place is Facebook. The site saw the Cambridge Analytica data scandal of 2018, which wasn’t strictly a data breach, but it saw Facebook sell the data of 87 million users to Cambridge Analytica (which users did not agree too).

Aside from Facebook, WhatsApp is the social media site with the largest concern for scams – with over 397,000 google searches for ‘WhatsApp scams’.

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