LinkedIn: Data from 700 million users for sale on the darknet
Professional emails, telephone numbers, salary estimates ... All this information was accumulated during data breaches.
This data sale for LinkedIn affects almost all users. Of the 756 million claimed by the professional platform belonging to Microsoft, 700 million people would be affected, or 92% of total accounts.
On this professional social network, members are in contact with colleagues, other professionals, and potential recruiters, thus posting their CVs or information on their former positions in companies. According to cybersecurity site RestorePrivacy, a hacker put their data up for sale on a popular hacker forum, exposing a data sample of one million users. RestorePrivacy analyzed the nature of the stolen data: email addresses, identity, phone numbers, mailing address, salary estimates, and social media account identifiers. This data is authentic and indeed comes from LinkedIn accounts.
An accumulation of old data
Already last April, 500 million users of the social network had seen their data hacked. According to another site specializing in cybersecurity, PrivacySharks, it seems that this new sale is an accumulation of data from previous leaks. LinkedIn responded in a statement, “We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and that no private data of LinkedIn members have been exposed. Our initial investigation found that they were pulled from LinkedIn and other websites and include the same data reported earlier this year in April 2021. ”
All of this information allows cybercriminals to carry out "phishing" attacks, that is, to send fraudulent emails to extract other data from users who are victims of their data leak. This precise information about you can be used either to extract money or to enter the information system of a company. More seriously, cybercriminals have the possibility of impersonating your identity by creating false profiles with your data. To overcome these problems, do not click on questionable links appearing on certain emails, and do not enter your bank details on a site whose link does not start with.
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