The sale of the data was first reported on Tuesday by cybersecurity news and research site CyberNews, which said an archive of user IDs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, professional titles, and links to other social media profiles was being auctioned. on the forum for an amount of four figures.
According to LinkedIn, the database “is actually a collection of data from a number of websites and companies.” LinkedIn users’ data only includes information that people have publicly listed in their profiles, the professional social media site, which is owned by Microsoft MSFT, said in a statement Thursday.
“This is not a breach of LinkedIn data, and no data from LinkedIn private member accounts was included in what we were able to assess,” the company said.
The news comes just days after a separate incident in which data scraped from more than 500 million Facebook users in 2019 – including phone numbers, birthdays, emails, and other information – was publicly posted on a website used by hackers. While this type of data is less sensitive than credit card information or social security numbers, for example, information such as phone numbers can still be misused by bad actors, including for robocall scams.
LinkedIn has more than 675 million members, according to its website, which means that about three-quarters of the user information can be included in the database.
Social media companies have tools designed to prevent scrapers – LinkedIn’s terms page describes “technical measures and defenses” against such abuse – but they don’t always work.
The company said that “any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping” is in violation of its terms of service, which prohibit third-party software, bots, browser extensions, or plug-ins that scrape data from the site.
“When someone tries to use member data for purposes that LinkedIn has not agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable,” LinkedIn said in its statement.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether it will notify users whose data has been scraped and included in the database for sale.
