If private photos and data about you are stolen, it is tragic. But if there is also professional information about you among them, it could be problematic. This is also the case with the renewed data theft scandal on LinkedIn, which affects 90 percent of all users.
Once again, a large-scale data theft is shaking LinkedIn. In the international counterpart to the German Xing, 700 million user data were stolen by a brazen hacker attack. And this number is not only frighteningly large, but also affects almost the entire community – over 90 percent to be precise. According to its own statement, LinkedIn has 756 million users.
It was only in April that criminals succeeded in stealing sensitive data from the network’s servers. In the spring, however, there were “only” 500 million data records, so the hackers are currently adding another 200 million.
HACKER ATTACK ON LINKEDIN: MILLIONS OF RECORDS GONE
The massive data theft attracted attention because the criminals offered some data sets for sale in a hacker forum. The blog Restore Privacy was able to ensure through random samples – and on the German side also heise Security – that it is complete and authentic data on LinkedIn users from the years 2020 and 2021. The hacker has details of name, email, address, location data, phone number, LinkedIn username, profile URL, gender information, résumé and information about social media accounts.
However, it has not yet been conclusively clarified how the data records could have been lost. It could be older data or something that hackers stole from various previous vulnerabilities. There is also the option of accessing user data directly from LinkedIn. The Privacy Sharks platform assumes that the hackers simply expanded the data records stolen in April by another 200 million. That has not yet been confirmed.
LinkedIn also emphasizes to Restory Privacy that it is assumed that the data set offered for sale “contains only publicly viewable information that was tapped from LinkedIn and combined with data from other sources.” It should not be a data leak on LinkedIn itself. In a blog entry , the network also explains that, as far as we know, there is a lot of data that the criminals stole back in April. The hacker tells Restore Privacy that he was actively crawling for data, i.e. that he was searching through LinkedIn.
NETWORK NOT AFFECTED THE FIRST TIME
This massive data theft isn’t the first to suffer from LinkedIn. As already mentioned, criminals were able to steal user information from the platform as early as April this year. In 2016, there were also indications to the public that 100 million pieces of data had already been tapped in 2012.
