14 DAY TRIAL // LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit in the Northern California U.S. District Court in order to discover the perpetrators of a massive and prolonged bot attack on its network, SiliconBeat reports.
"During periods of time since December 2015, and to this day, unknown persons and/or entities employing various automated software programs (often referred to as 'bots') have extracted and copied data from many LinkedIn pages," the lawsuit accusations read.
LinkedIn claims that the attacker intentionally went around its defenses in order to scrape user profiles and gather their personal information.
LinkedIn can get in trouble if it doesn't address the attacks
The social network, now owned by Microsoft, is the legal owner and curator of the data found on its site, for which it is responsible.
LinkedIn profiles hold information about a user's real name, addresses, work information, and other sensitive details. To protect some of this data, LinkedIn allows users to create private profiles.
These bots are obviously disregarding the users' right to privacy and collecting information that they did not mean to publish on the open Internet.
The company can get in trouble with authorities for not protecting user data, but it is also in its best interest to deter future data scraping attacks and protect its most important asset: user details and the connections between these users.
LinkedIn filed a similar lawsuit in 2014
LinkedIn has 128 million monthly active users in the US, and over 400 million globally. The company filed a similar lawsuit in 2014.
Just like this recent lawsuit, back then, the company initially filed the paperwork using unnamed "John Does," and used the court proceedings to force ISPs to disclose data about the data scraping attacks.
Three months later, LinkedIn was officially accusing a startup called HiringSolved of the perpetrated attacks. Three months after that, the two companies were reaching a settlement that to this day has remained confidential.
LinkedIn is now looking for a similar outcome, hoping again to get to the bottom of these attacks.
UPDATE [August 16, 2016]: This tweet from today from EFF's Senior Staff Attorney explains that LinkedIn is using a hacking-related law to uncover details about non-hacking, privacy-related offenses.
Oh, FFS people, stop using the CFAA to go after unfair competition.Is it hacking? No?
THEN DON'T USE THE CFAA!! https://t.co/brfYWrQxKC — Nate Cardozo (@ncardozo) August 16, 2016