Hacker puts up personal data of 500 million LinkedIn profiles up for sale

It’s only been a few days since Facebook’s data leak of 533 million users but another batch of 500 million users have been leaked, and this time it’s LinkedIn. Personal information of 500 million LinkedIn profiles have been put up on sale on a hacker forum, according to a report by LinkedIn.

There is an archive of 500 million LinkedIn profiles that have been scraped from the site and put up on the sale. The report added that another 2 million records have been leaked as a proof-of-concept sample under which it mentions the 500 million profile bank. The leaked information includes the full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and genders of LinkedIn members. The hacker has put up a price of around $2 to view the leaked samples of 2 million profiles. As for the 500 million profiles, the hacker has asked for a 4-digit amount which is expected to be in Bitcoin.

LinkedIn responed to the hack and saying that the leaked data is actually public information. “We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. 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 said in a statement.

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The company added that data scraping violates its terms of services, and it will work on holding the person responsible for this. Facebook’s data leak was also data scraping and not a hack, the company had said in a blog.