- Personal information from 500 million LinkedIn users was scraped and is reported to be available on a hacking website.
- LinkedIn announced that it was investigating it and has confirmed the database is comprised of scraped data taken from its website.
- The announcement comes following the discovery of personal data of 533 million Facebook users was discovered to have been exposed.
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The data of 500 million LinkedIn users was scraped and is available for purchase on the internet, according to an article from Cyber News. The LinkedIn spokesperson has confirmed Insider that they have data from public sources that was scraped off the platform.
“We are investigating an suspected collection of LinkedIn data that’s been advertised for sale and found that it’s an amalgamation of data from various of companies and websites,” a LinkedIn spokesperson stated to Insider in an email. “It contains publicly available information about members’ profiles that is believed to have been gathered from LinkedIn. It was not an actual LinkedIn data breach and no private account information on LinkedIn was in the data we’ve uncovered.”
LinkedIn has 740 million users, according to its website So the reported scraping of data by 500 million users implies that around two-thirds of the company’s user base could be affected.
The information includes account IDs as well as full names email addresses, telephone numbers, workplace details genders, as well as hyperlinks for other accounts on social networks.
The data has been advertised for auction on a hacker’s forum and the person who wrote the post also released a sample comprising 2 million data records to serve as an evidence-of-concept, as per CyberNews. The hacker is trying to sell the massive amount of information for a four-digit sum, as per the outlet and possibly in bitcoin.
CyberNews researchers have confirmed that the information was taken from LinkedIn users. However, they said that the data could have come from profiles from a prior date rather than just recently.
Paul Prudhomme, an analyst at the security intelligence firm IntSights Paul Prudhomme, a security analyst from IntSights, said to Insider that the information that was exposed is important because criminals could be able to use it to attack businesses through employees’ personal information.
“Such attacks could be much more successful because of the increasing use of remote working and the growing utilization of personal and home devices to work due to the COVID-19 virus,” Prudhomme said. “Attacking businesses through personnel’s accounts as well as devices is one method attackers can get around security measures for enterprise networks.”
The announcement comes shortly after the data of Facebook was also released on the internet. The Insider’s Aaron Holmes reported last weekend that the information that included full names, places as well as email addresses, was shared on the hacking forums. A Facebook spokesperson claimed that the data was accessed because of a security flaw that the company fixed in the year 2019.
Security researchers have told Insider the possibility that cybercriminals could make use of the information to impersonate them , or trick them into divulging confidential passwords.