LinkedIn Faces Massive Data Leak, 500 Million Users’ Data Up For Grabs; Firm Denies Data Breach

New Delhi: Days after a massive Facebook data leak of 533 million users (including 6.1 million Indians) came to the light, LinkedIn, a Microsoft-owned professional networking site, is now facing a massive data leak of 500 million users that is currently being sold online.

Email addresses, phone numbers, job records, full names, account IDs, links to their social media pages, and gender details are all included in the dataset. An anonymous user on a hacker forum is allegedly selling the breached data, which includes data from over two million users as sample evidence. The hacker is demanding a four-digit sum (in USD) in return for the stolen information, which may be in the form of Bitcoins.

According to CyberNews, “the four leaked files contain information about the LinkedIn users whose data has allegedly been scraped by the threat actor, including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more.”

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“While users on the hacker forum can view the leaked samples for about $2 worth of forum credits, the threat actor appears to be auctioning the much-larger 500 million user database for about $2 worth of forum credits,” The report mentioned

LinkedIn said in a statement on Thursday that it has “investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies”.

“It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” the company 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”.

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The author of the post, however, claims that the data was scraped from LinkedIn.

Experts warns that cybercriminals can use the leaked data to carry out targeted phishing attacks, spam 500 million emails and phone.

Personal information of nearly 533 million (53.3 crore) Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, was leaked online earlier this month after a hacker posted the information on a digital forum.

Facebook ID numbers, user names, email addresses, location information, gender details, work data, and other details were among the information leaked. Facebook said that this was old data from a previous study in 2019.