LinkedIn suffered another loss of its users' data

This time, data from 600 million profiles would be collected and put up for sale. Even if it is not sensitive information, it could still be useful to online bad guys

(photo: Unsplash) For the third time in four months LinkedIn has undergone a scraping of the data of its users that have been taken from the well-known social network and offered for sale online. An archive of data collected from hundreds of millions of LinkedIn profiles has indeed appeared again these days on a hacker forum.

The author of the post on this forum claimed to sell information collected by 600 million of LinkedIn users. The seller further claims that this data is new and better than what it has collected previous times.

According to the examples uploaded by this person, the latest data extraction includes name, email addresses, links to their social media accounts and other details such as gender, date of birth, diplomas and profession, which users have voluntarily shared on their public profiles.

To collect the data it was enough to use automated tools to perform the scan of LinkedIn, and compile the data of millions of profiles in an easily readable format, reports Tech Radar.

Even if no sensitive data has been released, the gathering of publicly available information on a large scale can still put users at risk of spam and phishing attacks.

Following the second case of such scraping, in late June, LinkedIn had declared that it was not a "data breach" and that and “no private member data” had been exposed.

The social network does not yet seem to want to take these incidents seriously and has not implemented stronger anti-scraping measures. Hackers can collect user information with virtually no opposition.

The American company, however, has ensured that "when someone tries to take member data and use it for purposes that LinkedIn and our members have not accepted, we work to stop them and hold them accountable".

LinkedIn is also engaged in a legal battle with rival company hiQ Labs extracting public data from LinkedIn. HiQ argues that a ruling against data scraping could "have a profound impact on free internet access". The US Supreme Court has asked a Court of Appeals to re-examine the case, which initially saw hiQ Labs' position prevail.


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Topics

Data Attack Linkedin Privacy globalData.fldTopic = "Data Attack, Linkedin , Privacy "

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