Hacker Releases Information on 390 Million Users of VK Russian Social Network

The details of more than 390 million VKontakte (VK) users have been leaked online, including full names, country of origin and even profile picture, according to an analysis by Hackread.

VK is a social media platform similar to Facebook that’s very popular in Russia and other countries in the region. It’s founded by Pavel Durov, who founded Telegram.

Social media scrapping is fairly common, and it’s one of the reasons why it’s a good idea to not keep your profile public. While initial reports stated that the stolen data was the result of a hack perpetrated against a third-party company, it seems that scraping is to blame.

“We can confirm that there have been no security breaches of any kind, including those involving personal information,” a spokesperson told Hackread. “VK user data is securely protected, and the content in question was collected solely from publicly available sources. This information does not contain any confidential data but consists of details that our users have voluntarily shared on their profiles.”

The stolen data was published on Breach Forums by a hacker named “HikkI-Chan.” His statements completely contradictthe VK comments, and he says the information wasn’t scraped.

“The data in question is from a second-order breach. It wasn’t sourced directly from VK, but rather obtained through a third-party breach that exposed VK data,” HikkI-Chan said to Hackread.

The information leaked online includes the users’ full names, city, country, URL links to user profile images (hosted on a partner service) and email addresses. This database, at over 27GB in size, is a massive trove of personal information. Even if it’s just the result of data scraping, it’s still dangerous information now available online.