LinkedIn was inspected by a data-scraping incident that impacted 500 million users in April, now a new list has appeared online with the record of 700 million users.
Analysis from Analysts at Privacy Sharks, shows that the data was found put up for sale on a popular dark web hacker forum RaidForums. A hacker named “GOD User TomLiner” posted it.
The data is listed under a for-sale ad that claims 700 million records are included in the cache. It was posted June 22, and it includes 1 million records sample list as a “proof.”
The sample posted contains full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers and industry information, as per Privacy Sharks researchers.
The origin of the data remains unclear, public profile scraping is believed to be the source of the data.
The same technique was applied by hackers for the 500 million records that were posted for sale back in April. That data set, according to the company, included “publicly viewable member profile data” and “aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.”
LinkedIn response
The social media company released a statement confirming that its networks had not been breached.
According to a press statement from the social media company, “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,”.
