Avito 2014

In mid 2014 the Russian classifieds platform Avito was targeted by automated web scraping tools. This mass parsing operation resulted in the collection of over 6 million active listings from the site. The data breach involved harvesting publicly visible information provided by sellers during the listing process. This incident highlighted vulnerabilities regarding automated data extraction from major marketplace platforms. The exposed dataset was later circulated on various underground forums and data exchange platforms allowing third parties to access seller contact details and historical listing information at scale.