LinkedIn denies fresh data breach, says 'members trust us'

The data breach was announced by an alleged hacker on June 22, who also offered the data of 700 million users of LinkedIn for sale, according to a report.

LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, has denied that data of its 700 million users was compromised in a hacking attempt. In a statement, LinkedIn said that private member data was not exposed.

"Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed," LinkedIn said on its website.

"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," the statement posted on Tuesday further said.

The company said that its members trust LinkedIn with their data.

The data breach was announced by the alleged hacker on June 22, who also offered the data of users for sale, according to a report by RestorePrivacy. The report said that the data contained email addresses, full names, phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation records, LinkedIn username and profile URL, personal and professional experience or background, genders, and other social media accounts and usernames.

Along with the statement, LinkedIn posted a link to a page where the company has listed prohibited software and extensions. LinkedIn said it doesn't permit the use of any third party software, including "crawlers", bots, browser plug-ins, or browser extensions (also called "add-ons").

It also said that the members who uses tools for such purposes is in violation of the User Agreement and risk having their accounts being restricted or shut down.

"In order to keep our members' data safe, we're constantly working to improve our technical measures and defenses against the operation of scraping, automation, and other tools that abuse LinkedIn's platform," the company said.