If you are still getting over the news that personal information from 533 million Facebook accounts has been made freely available online, brace yourselves for another leak. There’s another huge batch of people’s data floating around the web — and the company under fire this time is LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network. The potential scope of the leak is huge: according to CyberNews, an individual selling the data on a hacker forum claims it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles.
In an alleged sample of two million of the sales profiles, CyberNews found LinkedIn members’ full names, phone numbers, email addresses, genders, and more were visible. LinkedIn, however, says the data wasn’t all scraped from the professional-focused social network; it includes information from many places.
“NO PRIVATE MEMBER ACCOUNT DATA FROM LINKEDIN WAS INCLUDED”
“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,” reads LinkedIn’s statement, according to The Verge.
The company also contends that “no private member account data from LinkedIn was included” — which perhaps means that the data available for sale only includes information you’d be able to see on someone’s public page. LinkedIn insists that this was “not a LinkedIn data breach,” which would technically be true if the data was ‘scraped’ rather than ‘collected’ by a hacker penetrating LinkedIn’s systems, however, this information does not do much for users whose data is now being sold on the internet.
As of now, LinkedIn has not informed us if it will notify users whose data was in the dataset. (If you are wondering about the Facebook leak, the social media giant doesn’t plan to inform users if they are one of the people whose data leaked.) If you want to check whether your email or phone number was part of the Facebook data leak, The Verge has provided instructions here.
