Linked in data breach professional#
Linked in data breach download#

This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. In a statement, Privacy Shark garnered from Leonna Spilman, who spoke on behalf of LinkedIn, the company claims there is really no breach: 'While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. The seller confirmed that they abused LinkedIn's API to scrape data. How was the seller able to scrape hundreds of millions of records? According to RestorePrivacy, the seller abused LinkedIn's API, a similar tactic to the one used in the almost-as-enormous April LinkedIn 'breach', and the huge Facebook 'breach' in the same month.

Each individual request or visit is similar to a real user visiting a web page, but the sum total of all the visits leaves the scraper with an enormous database of information. Scraping happens when somebody uses a computer program to pull public data from a website, using the website in a way it wasn't intended to be used. This suggests that the data was scraped rather than breached. Note that account credentials and banking details don't appear to be part of the proof.

Linked in data breach professional#

Personal and professional experience/background.RestorePrivacy, an information site about privacy, examined the proof the seller put out and found the following information, scraped from LinkedIn user profiles: They're also classed as a 'GOD User', which could suggest that their name has weigh in the underground market.

Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.The underground seller known as TomLiner is in possession of the 700M LinkedIn records on sale. While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources.

PrivacyShark notes that the company has issued a similar statement this time: With the previous breach, LinkedIn did confirm that the 500M records included data obtained from its servers, but claimed that more than one source was used. No passwords are included, but as the site notes, this is still valuable data that can be used for identity theft and convincing-looking phishing attempts that can themselves be used to obtain login credentials for LinkedIn and other sites. He claims the data was obtained by exploiting the LinkedIn API to harvest information that people upload to the site. We reached out directly to the user who is posting the data up for sale on the hacking forum. Additionally, the data does appear to be up to date, with samples from 2020 to 2021. Other social media accounts and usernamesīased on our analysis and cross-checking data from the sample with other publicly available information, it appears all data is authentic and tied to real users. Personal and professional experience/background We examined the sample and found it to contain the following information: The user of the forum posted up a sample of the data that includes 1 million LinkedIn users. On June 22nd, a user of a popular hacker advertised data from 700 Million LinkedIn users for sale.

Linked in data breach download#

RestorePrivacy reports that the hacker appears to have misused the official LinkedIn API to download the data, the same method used in a similar breach back in April. The hacker who obtained the data has posted a sample of 1M records, and checks confirm that the data is both genuine and up-to-date … The database is for sale on the dark web, with records including phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries. Update: PrivacyShark appears to have been the first to report this, and has now obtained a statement from LinkedIn, below.Ī second massive LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes the data of 700M users, which is more than 92% of the total 756M users.