LinkedIn target for new data leak report – 06/29/2021

LinkedIn is the target of another report on the security breach of its users’ data. It is suspected that the leak may include information from 700 million users of the social network, i.e. approx 93% of the total number of people registered on the platform, Which is 756 million.

The case was revealed before Restore company website privacy. On June 22, a netizen posted on a forum. hacker That had to sell data from 700 million accounts. And he took a look at part of what that data would be, as he shared a file with information from a million profiles.

According to the site, after analyzing the sample, no passwords or card numbers were revealed in the file. However, the company says it has confirmed that these are real employees and updated accounts from 2020 to 21.

What does the form posted in the forum contain?

• full names
• E-mail address
• phones
• Home and work address
• Location records
• Usernames
• Profile Link
• professional history
• salaries and
• Other social media accounts

In response to the site, LinkedIn stated that this is not a data breach. “Our investigation found that no LinkedIn member data was disclosed.”

a tiltThe company mentioned the same thing. Check out the full note:

“Our teams investigated a set of purported LinkedIn data that was posted for sale. We want to make it clear that this is not a leak and that no LinkedIn member information has been disclosed. Our initial analysis found that this data was extracted from LinkedIn and other sites and includes the same information that was Reported earlier this year.

Users entrust their data to LinkedIn, and any misuse, such as information mining (known as scraping), is in violation of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service. When someone collects and uses this information for purposes that LinkedIn and our users have not agreed to, we act to stop them and hold them responsible.”

What are the potential risks

The amount of data and the fact that one person can piece together so much information is scary. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the developments in the case. The content of the complaint appears to include data that was already public – possibly from previous leaks. But the security risks did not stop there.

Cybercriminals can refer to information like this (and others) to draw a detailed profile of people, which can help with identity theft and engineering scams that use real-life stories to impress victims. You know that story about a relative who needs to borrow money in the famous”WhatsApp scamIt is a good example of the work of criminals.

“It is possible to lead these people into a fraud scenario. This can be done through an email, with the different data one has, it generates a very real story in which one can fall for,” explains Professor Rodolfo Avellino, of Insper (Insper Institute of Teaching and research), specializes in information security.

If there is any suspicious movement on your LinkedIn account, take some steps to prevent unauthorized access by others.

Initially, it is recommended to periodically change the password on the platform (or any other). It is interesting that they are different from each other. From this point of view, specialists highlight the need to activate (if not) double verification, to block possible fraud attempts.

Email messages or texting by prison cellIn addition to calls considered suspicious should be ignored. You should also not forward any request for information. Above all, contact for data should only be done through an official source.

Another recent case

In April of this year, the program LinkedIn also shared another master data presentation report.. The one who reported the case was the website “Cyber ​​News” which showed that the leak could affect 500 million users. The accounts were to be put up for sale.

Among the available data are similar items, such as names, email, phone numbers, and more. It was also sold on a hacker forum, where two million people can be reached for free as a sample. However, to this day, it is not known whether it was recent material or obtained from a violation that occurred on the same social network in 2016.

At the time, LinkedIn confirmed the leak, but said it wasn’t a security breach, but rather a discovery across other sites. The company said in a statement that there was “no information from members of the private sector” in the files.

*With information from “9to5mac” and “Tom’s Guide”