VK 2013

In 2013 the Russian social network VKontakte experienced a significant data exposure involving approximately 16.1 million user records. The incident was not a direct server hack but rather a large scale data scraping and parsing operation. The resulting SQL database contained personal details such as full names and mobile phone numbers linked to specific profiles. This data was subsequently distributed across various underground forums and darknet marketplaces making it a widely available resource for social engineering and spam campaigns targeting Russian speaking users.