According to a report, the data breach was disclosed on June 22 by an alleged hacker who offered the data of 700 million LinkedIn users for sale.
LinkedIn has refuted accusations of a data breach, claiming that the data put up for sale on the internet recently was “scraped” from the professional networking site cum job portal and several other websites, as reported in its ‘April 2021 scraping update.’
LinkedIn said that its members trust them with their data. According to reports, the data leak belted as scraped data contained personal details of LinkedIn users, including their physical addresses, phone numbers, inferred salaries, and geolocation data.
LinkedIn said in a statement “Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach, and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed,”
“Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and various other websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update. Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn’s terms of service. When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable,”
LinkedIn published the statement after various sources stated that a new breach has exposed the data of over 700 million (92 percent) of its 756 million users.