report 500m linkedincanalesinsider
Personal data from 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped and is reportedly for sale on a hacking forum.
LinkedIn said it’s investigating and confirmed that the dataset includes scraped data from its site.
The news comes after personal data from 533 million Facebook users was found to be exposed.
Data from 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped and is for sale online, according to a report from Cyber News. A LinkedIn spokesperson confirmed to Insider that there is a dataset of public information that was scraped from the platform.
“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,” a LinkedIn spokesperson told Insider 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.”
LinkedIn has 740 million users, according to its website, so the reported data scraping of 500 million users means about two-thirds of the platform’s user base could be affected.
The data includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, genders, and links to other social media accounts.
It’s been posted for sale on a hacker forum, and the post’s author also leaked a sample of 2 million records as a proof-of-concept, according to CyberNews. The hacker is attempting to sell the trove of data for a 4-digit sum, per the outlet, and potentially in the form of bitcoin.
CyberNews researchers confirmed that the data was scraped from LinkedIn users but noted that the information could have been taken from the profiles at a previous date rather than recently.
Paul Prudhomme, an analyst at security intelligence company IntSights, told Insider that the exposed data is significant because bad actors could use it to attack companies through their employees’ information.
