LinkedIn leak: 700 million users’ information up for sale following latest massive data scraping incident

LinkedIn has suffered yet another massive data leak in just more than two months since 500 million users had their information exposed. This time, the incident involves details from 700 million accounts.

The cybersecurity-focused website Privacy Sharks was the first to report the latest LinkedIn data leak. They found a June 22 post on the popular hacker platform RaidForums where the scraped data of 700 million LinkedIn users are being sold by GOD User “TomLiner.”

In the same thread, the seller has posted a smaller sample of the scraped LinkedIn user data and another file containing records of 1 million users. People need to be logged in on the website and use some RaidForums credit to access the latter.

Privacy Sharks was able to access the 1 million record sample and provided a screenshot in their report. It shows that the mountain of scraped collection of data includes full names, genders, email addresses, phone numbers, locations, industry information such as inferred salary, and inferred years of experience.

In LinkedIn’s statement, the company maintains that the incident is not a data breach as the data for sale does not include private information, such as passwords or credit card details. Despite the scope of the leak, LinkedIn is technically right. The incident is not considered a data breach; rather it is a massive data scraping that goes against the company’s policies.

“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,” LinkedIn said. “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.”

On the other hand, the latest LinkedIn data scraping incident still cannot be ignored as it involves 92 percent of its users. It also took place just more than two months since data from 500 million users were collected and sold last April.

LinkedIn users are encouraged to exercise caution. The scraped data would be enough for attackers to use in spam campaigns, targeted ads, and even identity fraud. It is also a good practice to regularly update passwords and check if email addresses have been involved in data breaches and other leaks by using the services of haveibeenpwned.com.

Photo by Souvik Banerjee on Unsplash