The Scoop on LinkedIn Scraping - ThreatWire
Added 2021-04-13 17:35:07 +0000 UTCBy Shannon Morse, ThreatWire
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Facebook isnβt the only company recently whoβs had a huge leak of dataβ¦ 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 wasnβt 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.
Itβs 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 - itβs 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 userβs 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/
