LinkedIn Confirms Data Breach of 500 Million Subscribers

Recently, LinkedIn became the victim of a massive data breach. Almost 500 million users’ data has been scraped from the platform and posted online for sale. The leaked data includes sensitive information such as email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details.
An unknown user sold the breached data on a hacker forum, who has dumped data of over two million users as sample proof. The hacker asks for a four-digit amount (in USD) in exchange for the hacked data, potentially in the form of Bitcoins. This incident happened right after a leak of scraped data from over 500 million Facebook users was leaked.

In an official assertion, a LinkedIn spokesperson informed the publication, “While we’re still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies. Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data”.

Over 740 million users have accounts on the LinkedIn and the company mentioned on its website that data of over two-third of its subscribers has been hacked and being sold online.

Hacking