a popular hacker forum sells a database of 500 million LinkedIn users. Although the word “leak” was mentioned in the media, it is only a compilation of publicly available data.
It’s no secret that friends don’t grow in the garden
In April 2021, the personal data of more than half a billion users of the LinkedIn social network for professionals got into the darknet. The administration of the network itself claims that there was no leak as such: the data was collected from open sources.
Information from LinkedIn was published last week on one of the popular hacker forums. The authors of the publication posted a “probe” containing the data of 2 million users, which could be viewed for two dollars (more precisely, for one “credit” – the internal currency of the forum).
The data contained user names, contact phone numbers, postal addresses, links to other social networks and details about the employment of LinkedIn users. The selection did not contain financial or legal information, as well as credit card numbers. Nevertheless, the published data array is sufficient for successful phishing attacks, both on people whose data has “leaked”, and on their colleagues and partners.