Vk Phone 2021

In 2021 a significant data collection involving the Russian social network VKontakte was compiled through automated web scraping and parsing techniques. This database contains approximately 5.7 million records linking private mobile phone numbers with specific user identifiers and names. Although the data was harvested in 2021 it remained within private circles for an extended period before becoming widely circulated on various underground forums and data leak platforms during the summer of 2023. The incident highlights the risks associated with large scale automated data extraction from social media profiles even when direct hacking of the platform infrastructure is not involved.