LinkedIn Data Leak: It seems like yesterday when 533 million Facebook users lost their data to some malicious characters. And now it was the turn of LinkedIn users. The personal information of millions of LinkedIn accounts was reportedly being offered on an online forum.

According to the reports, the personal data of 500 million LinkedIn profiles were posted to a hacking forum, with the cyber robbers revealing details of 2 million accounts to prove that this is not a hoax. The leaked details were supposedly scraped from the site which included users’ full names, email addresses, workplace information, phone numbers, and other data.

Defending its part, LinkedIn said that the incident was not technically a “data breach” because the leaked information was “actually an aggregation of data from several other websites and companies.” This likely means that the data obtained by the hackers was information that was already present on the site. The platform adding to its part denied the leak of personal data such as phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
How does this affect the LinkedIn users?
There are many different ways in which the data can be used by hackers for evil purposes. Anyone who buys the data from the hacking source can send spam messages to the email addresses and spam calls to phone numbers.

How can the users protect themselves?
Users should consider implementing several standard cybersecurity to protect themselves from such malpractices. This includes resetting passwords, reviewing what data is a user making available on social media and other websites, and enabling two-factor authentication on all kinds of online accounts.


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