After Facebook, LinkedIn Now Faces Massive 500 Million Data Leak - All You Need To Know

The potential scope of the leak is huge and an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from as many as 500 million LinkedIn profiles

New Delhi: While users are yet to come out of the shock of massive data leak of social media giant Facebook, Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn has joined the race with reportedly a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online.

According to a report by CyberNews, the potential scope of the leak is huge and an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from as many as 500 million LinkedIn profiles

The report also highlights that hacked LinkedIn profiles with another 2 million records are leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the hack.

"The four leaked files contain information about the LinkedIn users whose data has been allegedly scraped by the threat actor, including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more," the report claimed.

The leaked information includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work-related data.

"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 at least a 4-digit sum, presumably in bitcoin," the report mentioned.

Responding to the claims, LinkedIn released an official statement stating 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 professional networking site said.

The incident of LinkedIn data leak comes a month after personal data of nearly 533 million (53.3 crore) Facebook users, including 61 lakh Indians, emerged online after a hacker posted the details on a digital forum.

The leaked information included Facebook ID numbers, profile names, email addresses, location information, gender details, job data, and other details.