It hasn’t been long since the personal data of more than 533 million Facebook users was leaked online and now internet users have been hit with yet another massive data leak on job platform LinkedIn. There have been reports that data of close to 500 million LinkedIn users are allegedly being sold online.
The purported data has been put up for sale on a popular hack forum with an additional 2 million records leaked as a proof of concept by the people who hacked the website.
What has been leaked?
The leaked data includes full names, LinkedIn IDs, phone numbers, genders, hyperlinks to social media accounts and full names of the users. As per a CyberNews report, the data also included other work-related data of the users.
“While users on the hacker forum can view the leaked samples for about $2 worth of forum credits, the threat actor appears to be auctioning the much-larger 500 million user database for at least a 4-digit sum, presumably in bitcoin,” the report mentioned.
LinkedIn denies breach
Following the hack, the company released a statement saying that it has “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”.
“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,” the company said.
“When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable”.
On the contrary, the hackers claim that the data was scraped from LinkedIn.
Earlier this month, the personal data of nearly 533 million Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, was leaked online and posted on a public forum. The leaked data included Facebook ID numbers, profile names, gender details, job data, email addresses, location information and more.
Facebook acknowledged the breach but said that it was old data that the company had scrapped.
