LinkedIn suffers data breach of 700 Mn users, sensitive data being sold online: Reports
The data includes phone numbers, email IDs, physical addresses, geolocation data, workplace information & inferred salaries, and links to users' social media accounts
Linkedin again becomes the victim of a massive data breach after it suffered a data breach in April affecting 500 million. According to a report, this time, data of nearly 700 million LinkedIn users has been compromised.
The compromised data of more than 92 percent of Linkedin users consists of several personal details including phone numbers, email IDs, physical addresses, geolocation data, workplace information and inferred salaries, and links to the suers' social media accounts as well.
A LinkedIn spokesperson stated, “While we're still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members' privacy is protected,” as per the reports.
As the new dataset of 700 million subscribers is on sale on the Dark Web, the hacker has posted a sample set of 1 million users for buyers.
The data was reportedly obtained by the hacker by exploiting LinkedIn API. This was used to fetch information that people upload on the platform. The data doesn’t include passwords but other information is valuable and extremely sensitive, leading to phishing attempts and theft.
