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After Facebook, LinkedIn confirms data breach; personal details of 500 million users leaked

Data breach is a challenge many social media platforms are dealing with and in the last few days, the data leaks have become much more frequent.

LinkedIn
The LinkedIn leak has just come soon after data of 500 million users on Facebook was leaked.

Data breach is a challenge many social media platforms are dealing with and in the last few days, the data leaks have become much more frequent. The data is being collected and is sold online. Now, LinkedIn has been facing this woe as the job-searching/ professional social media platform witnessed a massive data breach. Personal data of more than 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped, which is also available for sale online. The data contains all sensitive information including email addresses, workplace information, phone numbers, account IDs and other links to social media accounts.

According to some media reports, the breached data is now being sold by an unknown user. The user, reportedly belonging from a hacker forum has released data of over two million users as a proof of data availability for sales. In exchange for data, the hacker is demanding a four-digit amount which is in USD and also likely to accept bitcoins. LinkedIn has confirmed this leak (via Business Insider). The LinkedIn leak has just come soon after data of 500 million users on Facebook was leaked.

It is to note that over 740 million people are a part of LinkedIn and if data of 500 million users has been leaked, this means that data privacy of two-third of its subscribers has been compromised.

A LinkedIn spokesperson has highlighted that the company is investigating this issue. “Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data,” read the statement.

A few days ago, Facebook reported a similar breach where data of 533 million Facebook users was compromised and leaked on a hacking forum. The dataset consists of users from 106 countries where 32 million users are from the US and 6 million users from India. A Facebook spokesperson notified that the breach took place due to a vulnerability patched two years ago. Meanwhile, a report by Reuters revealed that Facebook does not plan on informing the users whether their data has been leaked or not.

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First published on: 09-04-2021 at 16:30 IST
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