Personal data of 500 million LinkedIn users leaked online

Team Udayavani, Apr 9, 2021, 12:07 PM IST

Source: Unsplash

Facebook was involved in a massive data breach that compromised the personal data of 533 million users a couple of days ago. While the world was tussling with that, the world was stunned at the news of a data leak involving LinkedIn.

As per reports, LinkedIn has been a part of a data breach that has exposed data of 500 million users on the dark web. The report further adds that the leaked information includes LinkedIn ID, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, gender, links to LinkedIn profiles and other social media profiles, professional titles, and other work-related data.

As of now, it’s not clear if the threat actor is selling the updated LinkedIn profiles or whether the data has been aggregated from the previous breach.

LinkedIn acknowledged the data breach and said that the breach includes publicly viewing profile data that has been scraped from LinkedIn. It added that the members must trust LinkedIn with their data and that they take action to protect that trust.

LinkedIn informed that they have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.

LinkedIn clarified that this was not a LinkedIn data breach and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what they reviewed.

CyberNews said that the cybercriminals can use the leaked data to carry out targeted phishing attacks, spam 500  million emails and phone numbers, and brute-force the passwords of LinkedIn profiles and email addresses.

In order to safeguard yourself from possible threats, change the password of your LinkedIn account and the email address associated with the account and enable two-factor authentication on all your official accounts.