Data from 500 million LinkedIn accounts is for sale; site denies invasion

A few days after the revelation that more than half a billion Facebook users had their data posted online after the scraping of the social network, it is now LinkedIn’s turn to suffer an attack to extract data from the website’s accounts. Security analysts found data from more than 500 million users of the social network of professional contacts were posted by hackers on dark web forums to sell stolen data.

LinkedIn has downplayed the incident and said in a press release that the platform has no plans to notify its users of the data leak because it is based on publicly available information and is related to a bug fixed before 2019.

The information collected and leaked by cyber criminals includes full names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, professional titles and other data related to the users’ professional profile. It is not yet clear, however, how the data was obtained and how long ago.

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In the statement, LinkedIn said that while the data collected contains some “publicly visible member profile data”, it is “actually an aggregation of data from various sites and companies”. In other words, the data was gathered by a hacker who gathered information from various services. LinkedIn maintains that it has not suffered any data breaches in which hackers have penetrated its internal databases.

In any case, users’ eyes will now be on LinkedIn to see how they will respond to allegations of attack and whether they will notify users, even if there is no evidence that the site has been hacked. In a statement to an international cybersecurity blog, Cybereason’s security director Sam Curry, LinkedIn should have transparency as its standard and help users and customers.

“With big powers come big responsabilities. We expect a lot from those who have the privilege of having so much data. They must make some difficult decisions in the coming days, but only they know now what needs to be done. The story will judge them with a retrospective view and it will be clear to everyone, eventually, if they don’t do the right thing, ”said Curry. With international news agencies.