LINKEDIN MASSIVE USER DATA BREACH

According to the latest updates Linkedin data breach is one of the biggest breach in 2021, A popular hacker organization posted data from 700 million LinkedIn users up for sale on June 22nd. The hacker who obtained the data provided a sample of 1M records. They posted these records so that people can check to confirm that it is authentic, current and up to date.

A sample of data was posted by the user to the forum, which includes 1,000,000 LinkedIn users sample  contain the following information:

• Email Addresses

• Full names

• Phone numbers

• Physical addresses

• Geolocation records

• LinkedIn username and profile URL

• Personal and professional experience/background

• Genders

• Other social media accounts and usernames

 It is a  second major LinkedIn breach that exposed the data of 700M users. This is 92% of the 756M total users which is of course a very huge amount. Also according to reports, the hacker appears to have misused the official LinkedIn API to download the data,

The same method used in a similar breach back in April. In which Data of around 500 million was stolen through the very same vulnerability from LinkedIn earlier. At the time, LinkedIn acknowledged the data breach, stating that the breach involved publicly viewable profile data that scraped from Linkedin.

The complete database is available on the dark web for sale, which includes records such as phone numbers, physical addresses, data about geolocation, and inferred salary information.

The main thing is the database does not include passwords, but still, as the site notes this 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.

The LinkedIn officials have given this statement ” While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”

Also read:- Founder of world first antivirus, John McAfee Died in Spanish Prison.

Also read:- What is backup? Types of backups : All about it.