The sale of the data was reported for the first time on Tuesday by the news and research website CyberNews. An archive of user IDs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, job titles, and links to other social media profiles is said to be auctioned off. on the forum for a four-figure amount.
According to LinkedIn, the database for sale is “actually a compilation of data from a number of websites and businesses.” The data of LinkedIn users only contains information that people have publicly listed in their profiles, the professional social media site, which is the owner Microsoft (MSFT), said in a statement Thursday.
“This is not a LinkedIn violation, and no private member account data from LinkedIn has been included in what we were able to review,” the company said.
The news comes days after a separate incident in which data from more than 500 million Facebook users was deleted in 2019 – including phone numbers, birthdays, emails and other information – was made public on a website used by hackers. Although this type of data is less sensitive than, for example, credit card details or social security numbers, information such as telephone numbers can still be exploited by bad actors, including robocall scams.
According to its website, LinkedIn has more than 675 million members, which means that about three-quarters of the users’ information can be entered into the database.
Social media companies have tools aimed at preventing scrapers – LinkedIn includes ‘technical measures and defenses’ against such abuses, but it does not always work.
The company said that ‘any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping’, violates the Terms of Service, which prohibit software, bots, browser extensions or plug-ins of the website.
“If anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members have not agreed to, we work to stop it and hold it accountable,” LinkedIn said in a statement.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment, whether it will alert users whose data has been deleted and is for sale in the database.
