Massive data leak exposes 700 million LinkedIn users’ information

Hackers have already posted a sample of the data, which included information for 1 million users, according to a report on RestorePrivacy.

The data appears to be recent, with samples from 2020 and 2021, according to the report. In a statement to Fortune, a LinkedIn spokesperson disputes this, saying, “We’ve investigated, and there is no evidence that this is new data or that the data is from 2020 and 2021.”

The price for that enormous collection of data? $5,000.

The data examined by the site did not include login credentials or financial information, but it did include a wealth of personal information that could be used to assume someone’s identity, including:

• Full names
• Phone numbers
• Physical addresses
• Email addresses
• Geolocation records
• LinkedIn usernames and profile URLs
• Personal and professional experiences and backgrounds
• Genders
• Other social media accounts and usernames

LinkedIn maintains much of that data was not scraped from its site, saying, “LinkedIn’s current investigation indicates phone number, gender, inferred salary, and physical address in this data set did not come from LinkedIn.”

The bad actor who claims to be behind the data leak says they used the same method to obtain the data that was used in a massive April infiltration, which saw personal information from 500 million users being sold online.

LinkedIn, which claims to have 756 million members, issued a statement Tuesday, saying the data for sale was not the result of a hack but rather someone simply pulling data that was publicly available on a large scale.

“Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale,” the company said. “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 other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update…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.”

Correction, June 30, 2021: This article has been updated to accurately reflect the types of information taken and sold, and how that data was collected.