Data from 700 million LinkedIn users for sale

The data of some 700 million LinkedIn users appears to have been leaked. Technology website PrivacySharks writes that a dataset containing the leaked data has been offered for sale on a hacker forum. The website has obtained data from the seller from a million users and can confirm that information such as email addresses, names and telephone numbers are involved.

As a result, data of many hundreds of millions of users of the business social network again seem to be on the street. In April this year, data from 500 million LinkedIn users for sale. Hackers then used ‘scraping’ – the automatic collection and preservation of public digital information – to obtain data. It is not known whether that data is also part of the newly found dataset.

An initial response from LinkedIn to PrivacySharks confirms that the new dataset was at least partly created by scraping. “We are still investigating this case, but preliminary analysis indicates that the dataset contains information obtained through scraping from LinkedIn, supplemented with data from other sources,” a spokesperson said. According to the social network, there is no question of a hack, but it does violate scrapen LinkedIn Terms of Use.

Although this case does not involve sensitive credit card information or passwords, such large data sets are actively traded by cyber criminals. For example, they try to make spam or phishing campaigns more effective, for example by making them more person-oriented.