Analysts stumbled across a scraped data set from LinkedIn, in which the data from over half a billion users is being sold online. This marks the second major cybersecurity incident in the past week. The information scraped includes the full names, email addresses, phone numbers, professional titles and other work-related data. CyberNews analysts have been able to confirm that the data found on the online forum for hackers can be associated with LinkedIn user accounts, although it is still unclear how the data was obtained or how long ago.
In a statement LinkedIn said that while the scraped data contains some “publicly viewable member profile data,” it is “actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.” In other words, the data was put together by a hacker who gathered the information from multiple services. LinkedIn has confirmed that it did not suffer a data breach in which hackers penetrated their internal databases, and emphasised the data was instead scraped from the public-facing service.
