So you can know if your Facebook account was leaked 1:10
New York (CNN Business) -
Information gleaned from about 500 million LinkedIn user profiles is part of a database posted for sale on a website popular with hackers, the company confirmed Thursday.
The sale of the data was first reported Tuesday by cybersecurity news and research site CyberNews, which said a file including user IDs, names, email addresses, phone numbers was being auctioned on the forum. , genres, professional titles and links to other social media profiles for a sum of four figures.
According to LinkedIn, the database for sale "is actually an aggregation of data from various websites and companies."
LinkedIn user data includes only information that people publicly listed on their profiles, the professional social networking site, which is owned by Microsoft, said in a statement Thursday.
So you can know if your Facebook account is among the 500 million compromised
What to do if your Facebook information was stolen 25:13
"This is not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private LinkedIn member account data was included in what we were able to review," the company said.
The news comes just days after a separate incident in which data extracted, in 2019, from more than 500 million Facebook users, including phone numbers, birthdays, emails and other information, was published on a website used. by hackers.
While this type of data is less sensitive than, say, credit card details or social security numbers,
hackers
can still exploit information like phone numbers, even for robocall scams.
advertising
LinkedIn has more than 675 million members, according to its website, which means that around three-quarters of its users' information may be included in the database.
OPINION |
Does your Linkedin profile open or close doors?
Strategies to maximize your business and sales opportunities
Social media companies have tools in place to prevent web scraping, a technique for extracting information from websites.
LinkedIn on its terms and conditions page spells out “technical measures and defenses against such abuse, but they don't always work.
The company said that "any misuse of our members' data, such as
scraping,
" violates its terms of service, which prohibit third-party software,
bots
, browser extensions or add-ons that extract data from the site.
"When someone tries to take member data and use it for purposes that LinkedIn and our members have not agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable," LinkedIn said in its statement.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it will alert users whose data was mined and is included in the database for sale.
