Dissecting ‘SocialNet’: A Chinese Surveillance Op

Cyble researchers discovered an openly accessible Elasticsearch cluster called 'SocialNet' hosted in China containing ~7.6 TB and billions of records including scraped LinkedIn/Twitter data, chat logs (Telegram, WeChat), plain-text credentials (≈193M records), U.S. political communications, campaign finance and citizen databases from multiple countries; the report characterizes this as a large-scale social surveillance/data collection operation with potential political targeting implications.