LinkedIn Data Breach: Over 92% Users' Information Exposed & Put For Sale On Dark Web; Here's What You Should Do Now

This breach came to light after a user of a popular hacker forum online posted an advertisement for the data from 700 million LinkedIn users on June 22nd.

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New Delhi: The professional networking site LinkedIn experienced its second massive data breach that reportedly exposes the data of 700 million users, which is more than 92% of the total 756 million users. 

The hacker then put the data obtained from the site for sale on the dark web, which includes phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries.

This breach came to light after a user of a popular hacker forum online posted an advertisement for the data from 700 million LinkedIn users on June 22nd. The hacker posted a sample of 1 million records of LinkedIn users, as confirmed in a report by RestorePrivacy.

The report said that they reached out directly to the user who is posting the data up for sale on the hacking forum. "The user claims the data was obtained by exploiting the LinkedIn API to harvest information that people upload to the site". The report further stated the breached data contains a plethora of information including physical address and phone numbers.

Although no passwords are included, it is still valuable data that can be used for identity theft and convincing-looking phishing attempts that can themselves be used to obtain login credentials for LinkedIn and other sites.

LinkedIn released a statement on the matter and said that it is not a data breach but a data scrape, "Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. 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."

What can users do

According to media reports, while records don’t seem to contain any information such as credit card details or private messages expert hackers may still be able to track down sensitive data through just an email address. So it is advised to change your password on LinkedIn and passwords for other online accounts. Similarly, two-factor authentication will also help prevent such attacks.