LinkedIn data breach: Over 92% of users’ information exposed, put on sale

New Delhi: Professional networking site LinkedIn experienced its second large-scale data breach that reportedly exposed the data of 700 million users, more than 92% of the total 756 million users.

The hackers then put the data obtained from the site for sale on the dark web, including phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data and estimated salaries.

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The breach came to light when a user of a popular hacker forum posted an ad online for data on 700 million LinkedIn users on June 22. The hacker posted a sample of 1 million records of LinkedIn users, as confirmed in a report by Restore Privacy.

The report said that they reached directly to the user who is posting the data for sale on the hacking forum. “User claims that the data was obtained using LinkedIn APIs to deduce information uploaded by people to the site”. The report further stated that the breached data contained a plethora of information, including physical addresses and phone numbers.

Although there is no password involved, it is still valuable data that can be used for identity theft and phishing attempts that can be used to obtain login credentials for LinkedIn itself and other sites.

LinkedIn issued a statement on the matter, saying that this is not a data breach but a data scrap, “Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear.” That this data is not breached and no personal LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our preliminary investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and various other websites and includes the same data as earlier this year was reported in our April 2021 Scraping Update.”

what users can do

According to media reports, although the records do not include any information such as credit card details or private messages, expert hackers may still be able to track down sensitive data through just an email address. It is therefore advisable to change your password on LinkedIn and passwords for other online accounts. Similarly, two-factor authentication will also help prevent such attacks.

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