This week, the world was shocked that the personal user information from 533 million Facebook accounts was made available online. Now, there is another batch of people’s data published online. The data includes account information from LinkedIn (the Microsoft-owned social network) users.
The potential scope of the leak is not small. The individual selling the data says that it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles. To prove the information is available, the leaker offered a sample of two million accounts, displaying full names, email addresses, genders, phone numbers, and more.
LinkedIn allays worries
The company says that the data includes information from other sources and wasn’t all scraped from the social network. In a statement, LinkedIn says that it has investigated an alleged set of its data that has been posted for sale and has determined that it aggregates data from other websites and companies. The company further defends itself by saying that the data does not contain private member information from LinkedIn.
That probably means that the information scraped is the kind you would find publicly available on someone’s social network page. The company insists that this was not a LinkedIn data breach (which would arguably be much worse by several orders of magnitude).
What will LinkedIn do?
It would be a true statement to say it was a data breach if the attacker had penetrated the systems. However, since the individual selling the information scraped for it, it does not count as a data breach. However, technicalities aside, this is not something someone whose information is being sold on the internet wants to hear. The company has not said anything about whether it plans on telling users who have been affected.
Facebook, following its usual villainous big tech style of operation, doesn’t plan to inform users that their data was leaked.
15 hours ago
