Last Updated on 22/11/2021 by Sanskriti
700 million users have been reportedly exposed as a result of a data breach in LinkedIn. More than 92 percent of the company’s users were targeted in the attack out of a total user base of 756 million. It is believed that an anonymous hacker must have stolen a fresh dataset including personal information about LinkedIn members, including phone numbers, physical locations, geolocation data, and estimated incomes.
In April almost 500 million users were affected due to the data breach in LinkedIn, which consisted of personal information such as phone numbers, phone numbers, company information, account IDs, complete names, connections to social network profiles, and gender characteristics were revealed online.
The information was obtained by skimming the network rather than a data breach, according to LinkedIn. While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”
The hacker has also released a data sample of 1 million people for purchasers on the Dark Web, where the fresh dataset of 700 million individuals is also on sale. As Restore Privacy was the first to discover the listing on the Dark Web, The sample data set released on the Dark web includes all the personal information provided by the users on LinkedIn.
The data was obtained via abusing the LinkedIn API to capture information that individuals submit to the website, says the hacker when contacted.
Although the data does not include passwords, it is nevertheless extremely valuable and may be used in identity theft or phishing operations.
It’s critical to check the safety, security, and privacy settings of the applications you use to ensure that they’re set up correctly in order to secure your data. And it is important to make sure that you have a strong password and that you change it often.
