It was reported by Cybernews that there’s data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles on sale on a hacker forum. Another 2 million records were leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by the post author.
The leaked data includes LinkedIn IDs, Full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, profiles links, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work related data. However, LinkedIn responded saying that the data wasn’t all scraped from them.
“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,” wrote 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.”
The leaked files appear to only contain LinkedIn profile information—credit card details or legal documents were seen in the sample. Even so, email addresses can still cause real damage through phishing.
To make sure you keep your data safe, you can try following these steps:
- Change the password of your LinkedIn and email accounts
- Using a password manager to create strong passwords and store them securely
- Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your online accounts
- Beware of suspicious LinkedIn messages and connection requests from strangers
We also reported a huge breach of more than 500 million Facebook profiles, which affected profiles from more than 100 countries. This included Malaysia—with over 11 million Malaysians users (exactly 11,675,894 accounts).
