Following a recent data breach, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has apparently suffered yet another big breach, this time exposing the data of 700 million users around the world. According to a report, the professional networking site has disputed it. The data breach, according to the report, includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, and industry information. Late last week, a user on popular Forum put the data up for sale. According to Forbes, the news site Privacy Sharks discovered it and notified LinkedIn after validating a 1 million record sample given by the seller.
The corporation, on the other hand, denied that there had been a data breach. “Our investigators have looked into a set of allegedly for sale LinkedIn data. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach, and no personal information from LinkedIn members was exposed. This data was scraped from LinkedIn and other websites, according to our first assessment, and includes the same data that was disclosed earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update," LinkedIn said in a statement.
“Members entrust LinkedIn with their personal information, and any exploitation of that information, such as scraping, is a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service.” When someone tries to obtain member data and use it for LinkedIn-related reasons that our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable," the statement continued.
“Data exchanged online by users on a variety of apps is as insecure as the app they’re using.” Any vulnerability in the application or its API could result in a data breach," GajShield Infotech CEO Sonit Jain told IANS. “Users should follow a zero-trust policy and avoid sharing sensitive information on public sites.” “Enable two-factor authentication and update your passwords on a frequent basis,” Jain advised.
The professional networking site recently experienced a large data breach involving 500 million users, which is allegedly being sold online.
An archive containing data allegedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn accounts was placed up for sale on a popular hacker site, with another 2 million records disclosed as a proof-of-concept sample by the perpetrators. LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn accounts, links to other social media profiles, professional titles, and other work-related data were among the exposed data up for sale.