LinkedIn has experienced the second massive data breach this year that has now reportedly exposed the data of around 700 million of its users. The breached data includes online and physical addresses, geolocation records as well as inferred salaries of the users and is now up for sale on the dark web.
It is being reported that the data breach affected more than 92 per cent of all LinkedIn users. Recently, it came to light as a user of a popular hacker forum online posted an advertisement for the data from 700 million LinkedIn users on June 22. Meanwhile, Linkedln has denied the reports of a data breach, on Tuesday issued a statement and said that its teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. Clarifying that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed, the networking website said that its initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites. The user tried to sell the leaked information online, and for this, he/ she also posted a sample of the data breach. Data of a total of 1 million LinkedIn users are contained within the sample, as confirmed in a report by RestorePrivacy.
A recent report by the publication confirms that the data advertised by the hacker “is both genuine and up-to-date,” with data points dating from 2020 to 2021. The report further mentions that the breached data contains a plethora of information. Some of this includes users’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses as well as geolocation records. Other such leaked data points include LinkedIn username and profile URL, personal and professional background, and even the mentions of users’ other social media accounts and usernames.
