April 12, 2021

Another batch of people’s data is now available on the internet following the release of personal information from 533 million Facebook users released earlier on. While the potential scope of the leak is huge, an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scrapped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles. According to CyberNews, a sample of two million of the profiles for sale with LinkedIn members’ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, and more were visible.

Reacting to the news, LinkedIn disclosed that the data includes information from many places and wasn’t all scraped from the professional-focused social network. According to the work platform, “We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn 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” LinkedIn further disclosed that it wasn’t a data breach since “no private member account data from LinkedIn was included”. What this means is that the scraped data only includes information everyone will be able to see on someone’s public page.

For more information, read the original story in The Verge