The social media sites that have lost the most user data

/ 5th November 2022 /

Data breaches have become a hazard of being on social media, but some websites are worse at handling our data than others.

In Ireland alone, the Data Protection Commission received notifications of 6,549 data breaches last year and issued a fine of €225m to Meta-owned WhatsApp over a range of compliance failures.

Recent years have also seen high-profile breaches affecting the HSE and several involving Facebook, but research from Proxyrack lays bare the extent of the volume of breaches and the weight of people affected by them since the advent of social media.

Social media sites with the most data breaches

1. Facebook

Facebook has been caught up in a total of eight data breaches since its launch in 2004, including most famously the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which while not technically a breach, involved the company selling the data of some 87m users.

Either side of that, there were breaches in 2013, two more in 2018 and 2019, which altogether exposed the personal data of more than 2bn users.

T-2. LinkedIn

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn recorded its first data breach in 2012, claiming some 6.5m accounts were affected before updating the estimated figure to 165m in 2016.

The names, workplaces, personal email addresses, job titles and individual profile links of a further 66m users were scrapped in a 2018 leak, and the company has suffered a total of four breaches.

T-2. Twitter

Twitter, taken over by Elon Musk last week, was the victim of an attack by Russian hackers in 2016, affecting the records of 32m users.

Two years later the company urged 330m users to change their passwords due to a glitch in the site's code that temporarily exposed them followed by similar, smaller-scale glitches in 2020 and 2022, bringing its total of breaches to four.

T-2. Yahoo

Tied for second with four breaches, fallen search giant Yahoo! suffered its first breach in 2012 when an SQL injection attack revealed usernames and passwords in a plain text format followed by a hack affected billions of users in 2013, and two more in 2014 and 2018.

5. MySpace

Rounding out the top five, MySpace has weathered three data breaches, the first in 2008 shortly after it had been surpassed in total users by Facebook when 360m users data was stolen.

That information was sold on in 2016 when the site had become a relic of an earlier internet age, and there was also a similarly-sized hack in 2013.

Yahoo has dubious honour of the have the most users affected by data breaches involving its website. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Social media sites that have lost the most user data

1. Yahoo!

More than 3.5bn users have been affected by data breaches involving Yahoo, including the 3bn caught up in the 2013 breach.

2. Facebook - 2.1bn

Four separate breaches in 2019 pushed the number of Facebook users who have had data stolen past 2bn.

3. LinkedIn - 1.1bn

The majority of the 1.1bn LinkedIn users whose data has been exposed were affected by a 2021 breach that resulted in 700m users' data being sold on the dark web.

4. MySpace - 719m

Those three breaches have exposed the data of 719m MySpace users. The now inactive site had just 7m users in 2019.

5. Sina Weibo - 538m

Data of 539m users of the Chinese social media site, including 172m phone numbers were put up for sale on the dark web in 2020.

6. Twitter - 370m

Twitter confirmed in June that a hacker had gained access to contact details for 5.4m accounts, adding to the microblogging site's total number of affected users.

7. Quora - 100m

Quora, a website where users can pose and answer questions revealed 100m users' passwords and security questions had been exposed in a 2018 hack.

8. Dailymotion - 85m

A hacker stole more than 85m unique email addresses and usernames from video sharing platform Dailymotion's systems as well as the passwords for 18.3m accounts in a 2016 raid.

9. Tumblr - 65m

Tumblr announced in 2016 that its security had been compromised three years earlier, resulting in the user account details of 65m people being stolen.