A massive trove of LinkedIn account data has been put up for sale on a popular hacker forum just days after the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online.
As per cybersecurity news and research site CyberNews, a database containing information scraped from around 500 million LinkedIn user profiles has been offered for sale on a hacker forum, with the seller auctioning the database for a four-figure sum. As a proof, the leaker has posted 2 million records as a sample on the forum, which users can view for about $2 worth of forum-specific credits.
Based on the leaked samples, the records include such information as LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, as well as professional titles and other work-related data.
According to CyberNews, the leaked files appear to only contain LinkedIn profile information, and do not include sensitive data like credit card details or legal documents.
In a Thursday statement LinkedIn said that “data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.”
“It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” the company said.