Data breach: About 500m LinkedIn profiles data have been put up for sale in a hacking forum
DUBLIN: Another major social media data breach has surfaced before the end of the Facebook data leak controversy. It has been found that data from around 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put up for sale.
While LinkedIn claims that the incident is not a data breach, it acknowledges that millions of people’s information is available on other platforms. The hacking forum is said to have put scraped data from about 500 million LinkedIn profiles for sale. The incident was first reported by Cyber News.
According to Cyber News, the leak includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles and links to other social media profiles. Professional titles and other job-related information have also been leaked. The publication also says that a hacker is trying to sell these information for a four-digit sum.
The professional networking platform said in a statement that the data for sale 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,” the company added.
Social media companies have tools aimed at preventing scraping on their platforms. LinkedIn says that it will not allow the use of third-party software such as crawlers, bots, browser plug-ins or extensions that scrape activity.
The statement added that LinkedIn has a responsibility to prevent anyone from leaking data and using it for other purposes.
The Microsoft-owned platform has about 740 million members, according to LinkedIn’s website. It is reported that 500 million users have been affected by this scam. It means that the leak has affected two-thirds of the company’s userbase.
The LinkedIn hacking occurred just days after news of a Facebook data leak emerged. The information about Facebook’s 533 million users was leaked. The hackers accessed users’ phone numbers, Facebook IDs, names, addresses, birth dates, and email addresses.
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