Data from roughly 500 million LinkedIn member profiles apparently are up for sale on a hacker forum, CyberNews reports. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, says the issue does not involve a data breach, and no private member account data was included in the alleged data scrape.
Government organizations worldwide are watching the alleged LinkedIn data scrape situation closely, with Italy launching an official investigation on April 8, 2021.
The LinkedIn data scrape, according to CyberNews, apparently includes publicly available user information such as:
- LinkedIn IDs
- Full names
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Genders
- Links to LinkedIn profiles
- Links to other social media profiles
- Professional titles and other work-related data
LinkedIn Data Scrape: Social Media Company Statement
In a statement about the alleged data scrape, LinkedIn said:
Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and we take action to protect that trust. We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review.
Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service. When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable.
For additional information about our policies and how we protect member data from misuse: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/56347/prohibited-software-and-extensions.
Stay tuned for potential updates to this story.
