50 crore job seekers lost personal, professional and social media data in LinkedIn leak

According to reports, Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn is now facing a massive data leak of 500 million users allegedly being sold online. Earlier, social media platform Facebook had witnessed a similar data leak of 533 million users, which included 6.1 million Indians.

The data from 500 million LinkedIn profiles have been shared on a popular hacker forum along with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the act.

Reportedly, "the four leaked files contain information about the LinkedIn users whose data has been allegedly scraped by the threat actor, including their full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more," reports a media organisation.

The leaked data includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work-related data.

In a statement, LinkedIn said, "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." The company said, "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."