Avito 2018

Avito the largest Russian classifieds platform suffered a massive data incident in 2018 involving approximately 55 million records. The data appears to have been collected via large scale automated scraping or parsing of public and private listings. The exposed information included personal details of sellers such as mobile phone numbers and full names along with extensive metadata about the items listed for sale including prices and product descriptions. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of user data on marketplace platforms to aggressive automated extraction techniques used by third parties.