Top social media sites most at risk from scams
Proxy provider, Proxyrack has revealed which social media sites have had the most data breaches.
1. Facebook
Total Number of Data Breaches: 8
Facebook, the one that started it all, well almost. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and owned by Meta, which was formerly Facebook, Inc. this social networking site was one of the founding fathers of social media, so to speak.
However, the site has been caught up in numerous data breaches and scandals. Most famously, there was 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. This was not something that users had agreed to. Their first data breach was in 2013, with two others occurring in 2018, amidst the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The year 2019 would prove to be their worst, with a total of four data breaches, each exposing huge numbers of
2. LinkedIn
Total Number of Data Breaches: 4
LinkedIn is a social networking platform with a focus on professional networking, allowing employers to post job advertisements and job seekers to post their CVs. The first record of a data breach on the site occurred in 2012. Initially, the site claimed only 6.5 million accounts were affected, this total was updated in 2016 to approximately 165 million. The site suffered another leak in 2018, where names, work, and personal email addresses, job titles, and individual profile links were scraped, affecting around 66 million users.
Two more breaches happened in 2021, the first in April when public profiles were scraped of their data and later sold online, and the second in June, housing personal and professional data of people's accounts.
3. Twitter
Total Number of Data Breaches: 4
Twitter is a micro-blogging and social media network, founded in 2006 and is owned by Twitter, Inc. which previously owned Vine, a similar app to TikTok. In 2022, Elon Musk attempted to buy Twitter for around $44 billion, however, a few months after the offer was accepted, Musk terminated the deal.
In 2016, a group of Russian hackers who had already stolen data from MySpace and LinkedIn stole around 32 million user records from Twitter. Then in 2018, Twitter released a statement to its 330 million users to change their passwords as a glitch in the site's code had temporarily exposed them. The site experienced two more breaches in 2020 and 2022, both on a smaller scale than that of the 2018 glitch.
4. Yahoo!
Total Number of Data Breaches: 4
Yahoo! is an American web services provider that also runs Yahoo! Answers, a social networking service in which your Yahoo! credentials are used to log in. Yahoo! has been around since 1994, that’s a whopping 28 years.
Yahoo! would experience its first data breach in 2012, when an SQL injection attack revealed users' usernames and passwords in plain text format. However, 2013 would see them experience their biggest data breach and one of the biggest data breaches in the world when a group of hackers revealed billions of users' personal data. Yahoo! would experience two more data breaches in 2014 and 2018.
5. MySpace
Total Number of Data Breaches: 3
MySpace, launched in 2003, was the precursor to Facebook. They were the first social networking site to reach a global audience, having a huge influence on technology and culture at the time.
However, like Facebook, they have also suffered a few data breaches. In 2008, they had their first and most damaging breach, when approximately 360 million users' data was stolen and later, in 2016, was sold on the web which was when knowledge of the breach became public. A hack by a Russian group in 2013, exposed similar amounts of data and again, the knowledge of this breach was immediately made public.
