Data from half a billion LinkedIn users leaked and put online

Out of the 740 million users that are now part of the LinkedIn service, Data from over 500 million users is being sold online to hackers, marking the second major cybersecurity incident to be revealed in the past week, following news of a similar occurrence involving Facebook. 

 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 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.

The leaked data up on sale includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work-related data

"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 an aggregation of data from several 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".

The author of the post, however, claims that the data was scraped from LinkedIn.

Earlier this month, personal data of nearly 533 million (53.3 crores) Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, emerged online after a hacker posted the details on a digital forum.

The leaked data included Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and other details.

Facebook said this was old data that it previously reported on in 2019.

"We found and fixed this issue in August 2019," a Facebook spokesperson said.

(With inputs from agencies)