500 Million LinkedIn Accounts Fall Victim To Hacker Data Scraping Campaign
It looks as though Facebook isn't the only online platform dealing with the fallout from a massive user data breach. Following reports of a data breach that includes information from 500 million LinkedIn users, officials for the company today confirmed those findings.
According to a new report, hackers scraped the site's user
data and are currently offering the ill-gotten goods up for sale. According to
the report, 2 million records have been provided as a proof-of-concept, while
the remaining profiles have a comparatively low [and undisclosed] four-digit
price tag.
Data obtained from this most recent scraping campaign
include users' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace
information, social media connections, and account IDs, according to CyberNews.
What is unknown is if the information up for sale is from a new LinkedIn leak
or if it was obtained from a previous incident.
Like how Facebook responded to its own "data
scraping" incident, LinkedIn appears to be downplaying the data leak's
severity. "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," explained
a LinkedIn spokesperson in a statement to Business Insider. "Scraping our
members' data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly
working to protect our members and their data."
The data has the potential to be used for attacks not only
against the affected LinkedIn users but also their employers through phishing
and other social-engineering attacks. What is increasingly problematic is if
unsavory parties combine data obtained from the LinkedIn incident with data
from other breaches to build highly detailed online profiles of intended
targets.
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