Data Of 500 Mln LinkedIn Users For Sale On Hacker Site, Company Denies Data Breach

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th April, 2021) Data scraped from around 500 million LinkedIn user profiles has been posted for sale on a website popular with hackers, the company confirmed but specified that there was no data breach.

The online sale of the data was first reported on Thursday by Cyber News. According to the news outlet, the leaked data includes LinkedIn IDs, full Names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to other social media profiles and work-related information. Commenting on the report, LinkedIn denied the data breach and said that the leaked information contains publicly available information.

"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. 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 said.

There are about 740 million users in LinkedIn, thus two thirds of its user base has been placed for sale online.

In one of similar high-profile incidents earlier in April, Alon Gal, a co-founder of Israeli-based cybercrime intelligence firm Hudson Rock, said that private details of 533 million Facebook users had been posted online. He said that the leaked data included Facebook IDs, phone numbers, full names, location, birth date, sometimes email address, biographical information and more.

He suggested that leaked data had been circulating online since January. The breach is believed to have affected more than 32 million users in the United States, almost 20 million in France, 11.5 million in the United Kingdom, and 10 million in Russia. Facebook said that the leak became known back in 2019 adding that the issue had already been fixed.