socialarks.com

About socialarks.com

Socialarks is a Chinese social media management company that described itself as a "cross-border social media management company dedicated to solving the current problems of brand building, marketing, marketing, social customer management in China's foreign trade industry". Founded in 2014 by CEO Jinbin Sun, the firm operated as Shenzhen Benniao Social Technology Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Shenzhen and Xiamen and over 10 regional branches across China.

The company's primary business involved providing a data management platform for automated and precise marketing for enterprises, deploying both iOS and Android applications. The platform was designed to manage social media data and enable the scheduling of advertising and marketing campaigns on major social media platforms, targeting the Chinese market. It operated by scraping vast amounts of user data from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to provide insights for its clients.

In January 2021, Socialarks was identified in a major data breach that exposed over 400GB of data from at least 214 million social media users worldwide. The breach occurred due to a misconfigured and unsecured ElasticSearch database that was left without password protection. This exposed personally identifiable information, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, profile links, and employment details. Notably, some of the exposed data, such as private phone numbers and emails, were not publicly available on the users' profiles, raising questions about the company's data collection methods. This was not the first such incident for the company; a similar breach in August 2020 exposed data from 150 million users.