Earlier this week, the personal data of over 533 million Facebook users leaked online. We now have yet another data leak involving over 500 million users, and this time, it is from LinkedIn. According to CyberNews, LinkedIn user data is up for sale on a hacker forum, with 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample.
500 Million LinkedIn Users’ Data for Sale
The data includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn and other social media profiles, and professional titles. The hackers are selling the data for a 4-digit minimum price.
LinkedIn has responded to the situation and says it was not a data breach. Instead, the company points out that hackers scraped publicly viewable member profile data from the platform. The Microsoft-owned firm also assured that no private member data was included in the data dump.
“We have 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,” wrote the company in a statement. “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.”
Following the LinkedIn data leak, Bloomberg reports that the Italian privacy watchdog has started an investigation into the company. Since LinkedIn claims that all the leaked data are publicly viewable, now will be the perfect time to review your LinkedIn privacy settings. You should also consider changing passwords for your LinkedIn and email accounts and set up two-factor authentication.
