What happens to LinkedIn user data?
The data of 700 million LinkedIn users were put up for sale on the hacker portal RaidForums. What happened and what are the consequences
As reported by PrivacySharks , a site specializing in reviews of VPNs and other privacy protection tools on the web, on June 22 last on the RaidForums portal, popular with the hacker community, a post was published in which a user claimed to have 700 million user registers of the LinkedIn social network, and wanting to sell them at an unspecified price.
LinkedIn has around 750 million users in total.
A 1 MILLION DATA SAMPLE
To prove his claim, the user – called TomLiner – attaches a file containing a sample of 1 million data to the post. PrivacySharks , who viewed that file, writes that it contained information such as users' full names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers.
LINKEDIN'S ANSWER
PrivacySharks reached out to LinkedIn to inform the company and ask if they would like to comment on the fact. He received a response from Leonna Spilman, LinkedIn's Corporate Communications Manager, who claims there was no data breach.
THE OFFICIAL COMMUNICATION
The company then intervened openly on the matter. In a statement posted on its website on June 29, LinkedIn investigated “a series of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and that no LinkedIn members' private data has been exposed ”.
"Our initial investigation", the company continues, "found that these data were extrapolated [in technical jargon we speak of scraping , ed ] from LinkedIn and various other websites and include the same data reported in recent months in the our update on scraping for April 2021 ″, when the data of almost 500 million users of the social network were put up for sale on the web .
"Users trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members' data, such as scraping , violates LinkedIn's terms of service."
WHAT HAPPENED
As PrivacySharks explains, the 700 million data offered for sale on RaidForums would be an aggregate of logs from previous leaks . This is not technically a breach , given that there have been no thefts of private information, but of scraping , i.e. data extrapolation (which may not be publicly accessible).
THE CONSEQUENCES FOR USERS
PrivacySharks explains that the data leaked and put up for sale poses a risk to LinkedIn users, who could receive spam messages or various scams in their mailboxes or phones, or even become victims of identity theft.
Users present in the list of leaked data they may also receive more targeted online advertising based on age, gender and occupation.
The published data, however, do not appear to contain credit card details or copies of private messages.
PrivacySharks advises users to use secure passwords and not the inadvisable "password" or "123456", to prevent malicious people – already knowing the email address – from being able to access their LinkedIn accounts.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/linkedin-dati-utenti-vendita/ on Sat, 03 Jul 2021 06:23:44 +0000.