827 million LinkedIn profiles on sale for $7,000

LinkedIn recently made headlines when the personal information of 500 profiles was put up on sale on a hacker forum. At the time, reports detailed that the hacker had put a price of around $2 to view the leaked sample of two million profiles. Now, a new report sheds more light in this regard.

GizChina reports that a user on the above-mentioned hacker forum has asked for a price of $ 7,000 ( ₹5,24,925 approx.) for 827 million LinkedIn user profiles. The user claimed that there are more than 500 million items on the list. The report also says that the number of these items has exceeded the scale of LinkedIn users, which originally stood around 740 million. This indicates that the hacker’s list is likely to contain outdated or duplicate material.

Furthermore, the report says that the hacker has packaged the data into seven groups. In addition to the user data of 500 million user profiles, the list is expected to contain packages that are labelled as ‘global users’ and ‘US users’, which totals to 327 million material. This material, however, is not being sold separately but in the form of these groups.

“This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” LinkedIn had said in a statement earlier this month. The company hasn’t responded to the fresh claims yet.