Linkedin Data leak: Data of 500 million Linkedin users leaked online

New Delhi: As the world is rapidly shifting online, data safety has become the biggest concern for any individual or organisation. Large enterprises and multinational organizations extract the data provided by their users, prepared and blend it by using complex techniques to provide analysis for the business to work with their data efficiently and use that data to identify new opportunities. Most organisations store these big data on their servers but as per some technical experts, any server is not 100% percent secure from online threats. Thus there are some chances of data leaks are available there due to some loopholes. Hackers use these loopholes to breach the security of the servers to download the data.

Days after a massive data leak from Facebook, now Linkedin seems to have compromised the personal data of millions of its users. According to a report of CyberNews, over 500 million LinkedIn users' data were leaked online on the dark web.

"An archive containing data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by the post author, cybernews reported.

According to the report, the data that has been leaked includes the LinkedIn ID, Full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, Links to LinkedIn profiles, Links to other social media profiles, professional titles, and other work-related data. The report further added that it is not clear whether the threat actor is selling the updated Linkedin profiles or whether the data has been aggregated from the previous breach suffered by Linkedin.

In its official response, Linkedin said that the breach includes publicly viewable profile data that has been scraped from Linkedin. “Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and we take action to protect that trust. We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn.