Profoundly Database Breach: Revealed User Identities?

April 23, 2019
identity theft prevention

Over the past few weeks Facebook has been quite active partnering with different app makers for their Facebook platform to incorporate where users can also enjoy it. Profoundly has been moderately gaining fame and somehow trended.

The app Profoundly is used to anonymize users who want to ask questions on Facebook. Despite the apps main feature of anonymity, they had failed to fully live up to their name. Why?

 

Breached Issue

Profoundly.me has been in hot waters due to its data breach issue over Facebook where they had admitted recently that a cyber-attack to their Headquarters had revealed all their user’s personal data, among which Philippines and USA were identified to be the top users.

According to data, this has been the largest data breach in the span of 10 years history of the internet.

 

How it was used?

It was reported that the attackers gained access with the user accounts and did whatever they wanted with it like the account owner themselves. Through this the attackers could had possibly spread malicious messages, posts, and worse spread malware.
Personally if I was the attacker itself (but won’t really do it), I could have had launched malware attacks that would mainly focus on ransomware, and then get paid in bitcoin. But that is fortunately not the case.

Confessing their feelings

Now that the app users are exposed, not only that their feelings were confessed, but this time their entire identity was exposed to the attackers.

Identity Abuse

The data collected can easily be used for identity theft and could be sold in the darkweb. Also, for those who are up to revenge doxing, this is a great chance to dox, which is another illegal activity from a harmless prank to a damaging prank.

How did it ever happen?

Three counted software exploits in the app’s system made it possible for hackers to break into all users account to obtain their personal information. Good news, Profoundly.me has already fixed the issues. But with all due respect to the affected users, their identities cannot be denied as the dignity behind those who confessed using the app has been tarnished.

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