The data of 500 million LinkedIn users is available for sale
The personal data of more than 500 million LinkedIn users was posted for sale online in another incident of collecting data from public personal accounts, as confirmed by the Microsoft-owned social and professional platform.
The LinkedIn incident comes on the heels of a massive leak of personal data from more than 533 million Facebook users at the end of last week.
The information - including account identifiers, email addresses, and other personally identifiable information - was collected from the social media platform.
Hackers released an archive containing data they said included LinkedIn IDs, full names, titles, email addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information on a popular hacker forum.
The dataset also includes links to LinkedIn and other social media accounts.
Moreover, the hackers have also leaked another 2 million sample records to validate the information and provide a teaser for the data.
Forum users can view samples of approximately $ 2 worth of forum credits.
Given that the leaked data does not contain payment card details nor passwords, it is of less value to attackers and will not sell for much over the dark web.
However, it does contain valuable personal information (workplace information, email, social account links), which is why it is not released for free.
- LinkedIn officials confirmed that the data received from the platform was included in the database, and explained that this was not due to a breach of the platform, but rather the data was collected from the LinkedIn site.
- The Microsoft-owned platform said: We investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that was posted for sale, and concluded that it is a compilation of data from a number of websites that include publicly viewable member account data that appears to have been collected from LinkedIn.
- She added: This was not a LinkedIn data breach, nor was any private LinkedIn member account data included in what we were able to review.
The social professional platform also echoed Facebook's comments that any misuse of the platform's members' data by collecting violates its terms of service.
The platform said: When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes that LinkedIn and its members have not approved, we work to stop them and hold them accountable.