A job-hunting site Linkedin has been involved in a huge data leak. As per reports, over 500 million LinkedIn users’ data were compromised in a huge data leak, reported India Today.
Quoting CyberNews, a source for breaking cybersecurity news and independent research, India Today reported that Linkedin has been a part of a major data breach that leaked 500 million users’ personal information on the dark web. The LinkedIn ID, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn accounts, links to other social media profiles, professional titles, and other work-related data were all leaked, according to the reports.
The report further said that it’s unclear if the threat actor is selling the modified Linkedin profiles or whether the data has been gathered from Linkedin’s previous breach.
As per the report, Linkedin said that the breach includes publicly viewable profile data that has been scraped from Linkedin. “Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and we take action to protect that trust. 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. 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. Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service. When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable,” the Microsoft-owned site said in a statement.
The Italian privacy watchdog has begun an investigation into the Linkedin data breach, which exposed the personal data of millions of users. The authorities have launched an investigation, according to Bloomberg, following “the dissemination of user data, including IDs, full names, email addresses, telephone numbers.”
As per the report of India Today, Cybercriminals will use the leaked data to conduct targeted phishing attacks, spam 500 million emails and phone numbers, and brute-force the passwords of Linkedin accounts and email addresses, stated CyberNews. Change the password on your LinkedIn account as well as the email address associated with it, and enable two-factor authentication on all your official accounts to protect yourself from potential attacks.
