[DIGITAL Business Africa] – The personal data of 700 of the 756 million users of the professional LinkedIn network have been sold by a hacker on the Darkweb since June 22, 2021.
And this is not the first time that this has happened. This is indeed the second time that the data of this professional social network has found its way into the hands of hackers. In April 2021, the data of 500 million Linkedin users had been hacked.
Restore Privacy reports that the hacker appears to have abused LinkedIn’s official API to download the data, the same method used in a similar breach last April.
On June 22, the hacker posted in a popular hacker forum that he had listed the data of 700 million LinkedIn users for sale. It also uploads a sample of data comprising one million LinkedIn users.
Restore Privacy states that it examined the sample and found it to contain the following information: Email addresses, Full names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses, Geolocation records, LinkedIn profile username and URL, gender, other social media accounts and names and finally the personal and professional experiences and backgrounds of LinkedIn users.
« D’après notre analyse et le recoupement des données de l’échantillon avec d’autres informations accessibles au public, il semble que toutes les données soient authentiques et liées à de vrais utilisateurs. De plus, les données semblent être à jour, avec des échantillons de 2020 à 2021 », précise Restore Privacy.
“Based on our analysis and cross-checking the sample data with other publicly available information, it appears that all of the data is genuine and relates to real users. In addition, the data seems to be up to date, with samples from 2020 to 2021,” says Restore Privacy.
The reaction of the professional social network was immediate. For LinkedIn, there has been no hack or leak of our data.
“Our teams investigated a set of data offered for sale that allegedly came from LinkedIn. We would like to assert that this is not a data breach and that no personal data of LinkedIn members is ‘has been exposed. According to our initial investigation, this data was scraped from LinkedIn and various other websites, and includes the same data that had already been reported a few months ago in our April 2021 Scraping Notice, “says the social network.
By Digital Business Africa