O LinkedIn is dealing with a major data breach. The data of nearly 500 million users has been stolen. This data was recently put up for sale in a hacker forum.
Major social networks have struggled recently when it comes to end-user data leaks that hackers steal through scraping. After we reported extensively on leaking more than 500 million data from older Facebook users and now it's LinkedIn's turn.
According to Cybernews, the profile data of around 500 million LinkedIn users of the platform were recently obtained. This data is now available for sale on hacker forums. There is now a sample of approximately 2 million profile data in circulation.
This leak involves LinkedIn profile information, such as full names, email addresses, phone numbers and more. It is impressive that not only the data was collected from the corporate social networking platform, but also from other places on the internet.
In response to the data breach, LinkedIn indicates that it is information from various environments, not just the platform. In addition, it does not refer to the data that end users have in their private environment within the platform. This means that it is only information that appears in the public profile of end users.
LinkedIn emphasizes that its own systems have not been compromised and that hackers have not obtained any information from them. Hackers only obtained the information by scraping the platform's profiles.
The corporate social media giant, part of Microsoft, does not indicate whether it will alert affected end users. Facebook, which was previously similarly victimized, has indicated that it has no intention of doing so.
