Data for 700M LinkedIn Users Posted is being sold on the dark web
2021-07-16 14:19:19
The information involving around 700 million users on Microsoft’s LinkedIn website is currently being sold online within the Dark Web. Information that contains a treasure trove of data surrounding each user that can be used for various levels of identity theft or other nefarious means.Privacy Sharks examined the free sample and saw that the records include full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers and industry information. It’s unclear what the origin of the data is – but the scraping of public profiles is a likely source. That was the engine behind the collection of 500 million LinkedIn records that went up for sale in April. It contained an “aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies” as well “publicly viewable member profile data,” LinkedIn said at the time.
- Full names
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses
- Email addresses
- Geolocation records
- LinkedIn usernames and profile URLs
- Personal and professional experiences and backgrounds
- Genders
- Other social media accounts and usernames
LinkedIn maintains much of that data was not scraped from its site, saying, "LinkedIn’s current investigation indicates phone number, gender, inferred salary, and physical address in this data set did not come from LinkedIn."
“We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed,” the company said in a statement on June 29. “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.”
And finally, the data could be a social-engineering goldmine. Sure, attackers could simply visit public profiles to target someone, but having so many records in one place could make it possible to automate targeted attacks using information about users’ jobs and gender, among other details.
“Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale,” the company said. “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…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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