LinkedIn joins Facebook with its own 500 million user data leak

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We’re still coming to terms with Facebook’s latest 500 million user leak/breach and now it is being reported that LinkedIn is dealing with its own. First reported by Cyber News, the scraped information was being sold on a hacking forum, with samples being provided as well.

Thankfully, it seems that most, if not all of the information, was publicly available information and LinkedIn tells the outlet the same thing, stating, “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.”

It seems that the data made available, and confirmed by Cyber News, contains a mix of LinkedIn public data that in some cases have been aggregated with other available information around the web. This points to LinkedIn’s statement being correct in that it was less of a breach and more of a massive scrape.

The outlet reports that the scraped data includes: LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, professional titles, and other work and profile-related data. While it is all publically-available information on LinkedIn, having it scraped and put into easy-to-access files means the information could be used by bad actors for nefarious reasons.

Even so, both Hong Kong and Italy are now looking into the new 500 million account scraping. If you are interested in seeing if your data was included in the breach, Cyber News has a tool that you can use to check.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Josiah Motley

Former KnowTechie editor.