Data Leak of Around 500 Million Users of LinkedIn
Just as Facebook’s data leaked recently, it’s LinkedIn as the victim this time with a huge data breach of over 500 million of its users dragged and posted for sale online. The data leaked contains user’s information such as their email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details. The data that has been breached is being sold by an unknown user on a hacker forum, who has dumped data of over two million users as sample proof. The hacker is asking for a four-digit amount (in USD) in exchange for the breached data, potentially in the form of Bitcoins, as per the reports.
J“While we’re still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies. Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data”, said a spokesperson of LinkedIn is an official statement of his.
JLinkedIn on its website mentioned that it has over 740 million users which tells us that data of over two-third of its users is breached and sold online. The news was first reported by CyberNews, and LinkedIn later confirmed the breach to Business Insider.
JSecurity analyst Paul Prudhomme told Insider that the dataset, if exposed to bad actors, could lead to attack on many companies through their employees. He said that these attacks are more likely to succeed due to the rise of remote work and use of personal devices for office work.
J“The leaked files appear to only contain LinkedIn profile information—we did not find any deeply sensitive data like credit card details or legal documents in the sample posted by the threat actor,” CyberNews said, adding that even an email address “can be enough for a competent cybercriminal to cause real damage”.
JIn the recent data breach of Facebook where 533 million were around found as the target with their personal information such as their mail addresses, phone numbers, Facebook IDs, locations, birthdate, and bios leaked. Also, it was told by a Facebook’s spokesperson that the data breached was due to a vulnerability patched two years ago