Employment-oriented online service LinkedIn has experienced a massive data expose for the second time in the year 2021. Reportedly, data of over 700 million users has been put up for an online sale by a hacker. As the social networking site has around 756 million users, data of 92 per cent of such users has been exposed.
According to Privacy Sharks, the data consists of the personal details of LinkedIn users like phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data along with inferred salaries. On 22nd June, the hacker had uploaded a sample of data of a million users on a hacker forum.
LinkedIn has acknowledged that as a matter of fact, the breach was an “accumulation of data obtained from numerous sources, including some data scraped from LinkedIn.”
It responded saying that LinkedIn’s teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that were posted on sale while assuring that there was no data breach and no data of private LinkedIn member had been exposed.
Linkedln further added, “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.” It continued with signifying how LinkedIn members trust the site with their data and therefore, any misuse of their data like scraping violates the terms of service of LinkedIn.
The online service assured, “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.”
