Even as the world is grappling with the report of data leak of around 533 million Facebook users, it has now emerged that Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn has also been exposed to massive data leak. As per reports, over 500 million LinkedIn users’ data is allegedly being sold online.
An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the hack. The report states that information that has been leaked includes the LinkedIn ID, Full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, Links to LinkedIn profiles, Links to other social media profiles, professional titles, and other work-related data.
“The four leaked files contain information about the LinkedIn users whose data has been allegedly scraped by the threat actor, including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more,” reports CyberNews.
“While users on the hacker forum can view the leaked samples for about $2 worth of forum credits, the threat actor appears to be auctioning the much-larger 500 million user database for at least a 4-digit sum, presumably in bitcoin,” the report mentioned.
LinkedIn said in a statement on Thursday that it has “investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies”.
“It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” the company said.
“When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable”.
