If you weren’t enamored with LinkedIn before, you’re not going to love this.
A group of hackers are currently selling the personal information over more than 700 million LinkedIn users.
Here are the data types that were leaked:
Email Addresses; Full names; Phone numbers; Physical addresses; Geolocation records; LinkedIn username and profile URL; Personal and professional experience/background; Genders; Other social media accounts and usernames
On June 22nd, a user of a popular hacker forum advertised data from 700 Million LinkedIn users for sale. The user of the forum posted a sample of the data that includes 1 million LinkedIn users.
LinkedIn has offered the following official statement regarding the data scrape effort, which it does not label as a data breach:
Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.
Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service. 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.
For additional information about our policies and how we protect member data from misuse: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/56347/prohibited-software-and-extensions
It’s hard to know what to do in the wake of this, as the damage has pretty much already been done. Be careful online and stay safe out there.
Via The Mac Observer and Restore Privacy