Many social media platforms are dealing with data breaches, and data leaks have become much more common in the last few days. The information is gathered and sold on the internet. Now, LinkedIn is dealing with this problem after a major data breach on the job-searching/professional social media site. More than 500 million LinkedIn users’ personal information has been scraped, and it is now for sale online. Email addresses, job records, phone numbers, account IDs, and other links to social media accounts are all included in the details.
According to reports in the media, an anonymous consumer is now selling the breached data. As evidence of data available for sale, the user, who allegedly belongs to a hacker site, has published data of over two million users. The hacker is demanding a four-digit sum in USD in return for the data and is also likely to accept bitcoins. This leak has been verified by LinkedIn (via Business Insider). The LinkedIn data breach comes on the heels of the Facebook data breach, which exposed the personal information of 500 million people.
It’s worth noting that LinkedIn has a user base of over 740 million people, so if the data of 500 million users are leaked, the data privacy of two-thirds of the company’s subscribers was jeopardized. A LinkedIn spokesperson said that the company is looking into the matter. The statement reads, “Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service, and we are actively working to protect our members and their data.”
A similar breach was announced a few days ago by Facebook, in which the data of 533 million Facebook users were hacked and leaked on a hacking forum. Users from 106 countries are included in the dataset, with 32 million from the United States and 6 million from India. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the hack was caused by a flaw that was fixed two years earlier. Meanwhile, according to a Reuters survey, Facebook does not plan to warn users whether or not their data has been leaked.
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