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LinkedIn must face lawsuit

Data for 500 million LinkedIn users for sale

LinkedIn confirms information scraped from around 500 million user profiles is in a database posted for sale on a website but the company says it´s not from a LinkedIn data breach but a mix of information from other sites and publicly viewable data from LinkedIn.

Cyber News, that first reported that there is LinkedIn information up for sale, says the full leaked archive contains users´ full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, and more.

The hackers have posted a 2 million entity subset to prove the merchandise adding they are selling the rest with Cyber News expecting it to be for at least a 4-digit sum presumably in bitcoin.

LinkedIn says it has around 750 million users in around 200 countries which means that, if it is true that the hackers have data for 500 million, it’s a vast part of the total.

LinkedIn in a statement commented on the Cyber News story saying:

We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review.”

So, as when hackers recently said they were selling massive amount of data for  Facebook users, the company played down the value of the information hackers say they have. Facebook said it was an old leak already reported and that the hole had been fixed.

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