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Vaibhav Srivastava 
9 April 2021It hasn’t been a week when the personal information of 533 million Facebook users was leaked online (which also includes data of over 6 million users) and now there are confirmed reports claiming data leak of 500 million users of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn. The data has been allegedly put online and is up for sale.
In fact, the information of 2 million LinkedIn users has been put there as a sample proof below which it is mentioned, 500 million profile bank. This compromised data includes the full names of the users, their email addresses, phone numbers along with gender information. Apart from this, the cyber hacker has asked to pay a mere cost of around $2 to see the sample data of 2 million users. For the intended customers interested to buy the other 500 profiles, the hacker has asked to remunerate an amount in 4 digits presumably in the form of Bitcoin.
Also Read: How To Keep Your Mail and Social Media Accounts Secure This Safer Internet Day?
Responding to the hack, LinkedIn said, “Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and we take action to protect that trust. 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. Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn 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.”
Considering the size of the leak, experts are saying now that if this data is exposed, it could result in attacks on numerous companies via their employees. The situation is quite delicate currently as a large number of the workforce is working remotely and using their personal internet and devices for official work.
Also Read: Why You Should Implement Business Intelligence Solutions in 2021?
