LinkedIn is facing the same issue as Facebook back in 2019. LinkedIn, a Microsoft-owned social network confirmed on Thursday that there has been a potential breach of data in LinkedIn and an individual hacker is selling data on a hacker forum claiming to be 500 million LinkedIn profiles. The sale of the data was first reported on Tuesday by cybersecurity news and it includes the detail of the LinkedIn users such as their user IDs, names, email address, phone numbers, genders, professional titles, and links to other social media.
LinkedIn also reported that the data which was leaked was public information posted by the users in LinkedIn. LinkedIn also infirmed that no private member accounts data was leaked in the data breach which means the scraped data were already visible on the user’s public page. LinkedIn insists that this was not a data breach within their company. Technically it would be true but it doesn’t help the users’ data which is being sold on the internet now.
Social media have the necessary tools in place to avoid these types of incidents but they don’t always work. LinkedIn has about 650 million users which could be misused by cybercriminals and as of yet now LinkedIn hasn’t decided to inform about this data breach their users.