Personal data of 700M LinkedIn users, which is more than 92% of the total 756M users, has exposed in the latest data breach and is up for sale on dark web, reports RestorePrivacy. Leaked data includes phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries. According to 9to5Mac, the hacker has posted a sample of 1M records, which is both genuine and up-to-date.
RestorePrivacy reports that “the hacker have misused the official LinkedIn API to download the data” and advertised this data of 700 million LinkedIn users on June 22. RestorePrivacy examined the sample of data and found that its includes following information:
- Email Addresses
- Full names
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses
- Geolocation records
- Username and profile URL
- Personal and professional experience/background
- Genders
- Other social media accounts and usernames
However, no passwords are included in this data, but as RestorePrivacy notes, this data is still valuable and one can use it for identity theft and phishing attempts.
After this report the company has told Gadgets 360 in a statement that,
“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 user 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.”
Till then you can visit sites like “Have I Been Pwned” to check of your email address is part of a data breach.