Oh Look, After Facebook, LinkedIn too Has a Data Leak

A week into the data leak of 500 million Facebook users — the LinkedIn data leak is confirmed.

Yes, we have another data breach report, and this time it’s LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a Microsoft-owned professional networking platform.

A massive data leak has been reported related to LinkedIn users’ profiles recently.

How Severe is the Data Leak?

500 million LinkedIn users’ data were scraped by the hackers and put to sale.

Another 2 million data records were leaked as a proof-of-concept on a hacker forum.

CyberNews reported that four leaked files contain full names of the LinkedIn users, LinkedIn IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, workplace, and more such information.

The “threat actor” is auctioning all of the data for approximately a 4-digit sum in bitcoin.

LinkedIn has 740 million+ user profiles.

This means the company is a victim of over ⅔ rd of total subscribers.

According to security analyst Paul Prudhomme, if the leaked data is exposed to bad hands, it may lead to attack on big companies through their own employees.

What’s LinkedIn Saying about the Data Leak?

After the LinkedIn data leak, a LinkedIn spokesperson denied that there was a data breach.

He mentioned that no private LinkedIn account data has been exposed.

According to that LinkedIn person, it was just “an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies” that are “publicly viewable”.

The company assumed that data of open member profiles were scraped from LinkedIn.

However, scraping data of LinkedIn members without LinkedIn’s permit seems to be a violation of LinkedIn’s terms and conditions.

The spokesperson added, “Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service”, and they worked to stop such practices while holding them “accountable”.

How to Protect Yourself from Data Leaks

A few days ago in this very month, 533 million Facebook users’ personal data was leaked.

The large dataset included records of users from 106 countries.

There were 32 million users from the US and 6 million Indian users.

Facebook IDs, phone numbers, email addresses, birthdate, locations, and bios have been exposed.

And, now, LinkedIn faced a similar kind of data breach.

• As a user, it’s important to be careful about the privacy settings. Read all the safety and security measures of the apps you are using
• Share nothing but necessary information online
• Change your passwords often across all platforms
• Passwords should be strong
• You could save a strong password in a strong password manager auto-fill
• Also, enable two-factor verification method whenever possible
• Don’t accept connections from unknown LinkedIn and Facebook users
• To know if your profile is a victim of a data leak, check here

And you should get a screen like this.

Originally published at https://www.reddit.com.