VKontakte Breach

In September 2024, a hacker known as "HikkI-Chan" claimed to have leaked personal data belonging to over 370 million users of VKontakte (VK), Russia’s largest social media platform. The dataset, reportedly totaling 27.6 GB, included users’ full names, genders, profile ID numbers, profile pictures, and location details. However, rather than resulting from a system intrusion, the information appears to have been collected through web scraping — a process where automated tools systematically harvest publicly available data from websites at scale.

VK responded swiftly to the claims, denying any security breach. The company emphasized that no confidential or private user information, such as passwords or sensitive personal data, had been compromised. According to VK, the leaked dataset was compiled entirely from information that users had made publicly accessible on their profiles, and their internal security systems remained intact and uncompromised.