A hacker forum user claimed to have the records of 700 million LinkedIn users for sale, according to a report by website Privacy Sharks.
The website said its researchers have viewed a sample of one million records from the seller, claiming that the sample includes information such as full names, phone numbers, email addresses, gender and industry information.
A separate report by website Restore Privacy stated that the sample also includes information such as geolocation records, physical addresses and inferred salary. The website also reached out to the seller who claimed that the data was obtained by “exploiting” LinkedIn’s API (application programme interface).
Restore Privacy reported that the seller is asking for US$5,000 (RM20,755) as the price for the complete data set.
LinkedIn in a statement on June 29 addressing the issue said it has investigated the set of alleged data for sale, adding that no incident of data breach has occurred on its platform.
“We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update,” the company said in the statement.
Scraping is the process of importing information from a website onto a separate folder in a local computer and can be performed using automated tools. LinkedIn stated that it protect members’ data by not permitting the use of any third party software to scrape information from its website.
In April, information scraped from 500 million users were put up for sale on a hacker website, according to a CNN report.
The company in a statement then said the alleged set of data is an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies, including publicly viewable member profiles from its platform.
It added that the data set is not a result of a data breach at LinkedIn and no private data from its members were exposed based on its review.
