LinkedIn Breach Reportedly Exposes Data of 92% of Users, Including Inferred Salaries

A second massive LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes the data of 700M users, which is more than 92% of the total 756M users. The database is for sale on the dark web, with records including phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries. 9to5Mac reports: RestorePrivacy reports that the hacker appears to have misused the official LinkedIn API to download the data, the same method used in a similar breach back in April: 'On June 22nd, a user of a popular hacker advertised data from 700 Million LinkedIn users for sale. The user of the forum posted up a sample of the data that includes 1 million LinkedIn users. We examined the sample and found it to contain the following information: Email Addresses; Full names; Phone numbers; Physical addresses; Geolocation records; LinkedIn username and profile URL; Personal and professional experience/background; Genders; and Other social media accounts and usernames.'

With the previous breach, LinkedIn did confirm that the 500M records included data obtained from its servers, but claimed that more than one source was used. PrivacyShark notes that the company has issued a similar statement this time: 'While we're still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources. This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members' privacy is protected.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.