14 DAY TRIAL // LinkedIn said that the claims of a purported data breach were not accurate, because marketed data was not hacked from LinkedIn by using security flaws, but rather through scraping many Internet sources, as detailed in the firm's April 2021 data scraping update, says Business Today.
LinkedIn stated, "Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach, and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed".
"Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and various other websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update. Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members' data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn's 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".
More than 700 million LinkedIn users’ records were listed for sale on a hacking forum
Recently, a hacker grabbed 700 million records and posted a sample of 1 million data on a well-known hacking forum, demonstrating his skills and advertising his allegedly stolen data set. Gender, industry information, email addresses, full names, and even phone numbers were among the information contained in the documents.
In addition to publicly available user information, the disclosed data included publicly viewable non-personal information such as company names, countries of origin, and in some cases social media usernames.
An earlier LinkedIn data leak, which occurred in April of this year and was purportedly linked to the loss of data from approximately 500 million user accounts, is comparable to this one. Regardless of LinkedIn position, it is advisable to secure your account.