Things are not looking good for LinkedIn right now. Just two months after a jaw-dropping 500 million profiles from the networking site were put up for sale on a popular hacker forum, a new posting with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared.
The seller, “GOD User” TomLiner, stated they were in possession of the 700 million records on June 22 2021, and included a sample of 1 million records on RaidForums to prove their claims. Our researchers have viewed the sample and can confirm that the damning records include information such as full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers, and industry information.
We reached out to LinkedIn for verification and received this official statement from Leonna Spilman:
“While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”
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Is the data the same as from the previous LinkedIn leak?
According to a statement from LinkedIn, the previous data leak contained an “aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies” as well “publicly viewable member profile data.” However, it was not technically a breach since no private information was stolen.
This time around, it seems as though the records are, once again, a cumulation of data from previous leaks. However, this could still include information from both public and private profiles. We employ a strict policy of not supporting sellers of stolen data and, therefore, have not purchased the leaked list to verify all of the records.
Source: Exclusive: 700 Million LinkedIn Records Leaked June 2021 | Safety First
Robin Edgar
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