The Scoop on LinkedIn Scraping - ThreatWire
Added 2021-04-13 17:35:07 +0000 UTCBy Shannon Morse, ThreatWire
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Facebook isn’t the only company recently who’s had a huge leak of data… Enter LinkedIn. According to outlets, 500 million LinkedIn profiles were leaked, including full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders and more. LinkedIn states this data is from many platforms, not just theirs, but it does include public profile data scraped from the professional networking platform as well. They also state this wasn’t a data breach and no private info was included. LinkedIn also mentions that scraping of data is against their terms of service, as if anyone scraping data would care that they were violating TOS.
It’s unclear if LinkedIn will be held to any accountability for this data scraping since it could be in violation of GDPR.
Data on this leak is somewhat unclear - it’s unknown when this data was scraped or which platforms it came from other than LinkedIn.
Cybernews.com has published a tool to check if your data has been leaked, similar to Have I Been Pwned.
With LinkedIn, as well as Facebook, this kind of information can be used for all sorts of phishing attacks including by email and phone. Sim swapping is definitely a potential threat as is an attacker using a fake profile to social engineer a user’s contacts.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/8/22374464/linkedin-data-leak-500-million-accounts-scraped-microsoft
https://news.linkedin.com/2021/april/an-update-from-linkedin
https://threatpost.com/data-500m-linkedin-users-online/165329/
https://cybernews.com/personal-data-leak-check/
