Researchers at Cyber News uncovered on a hacker forum a database containing data for 500 million LinkedIn users. A spokesperson for the service confirmed the existence of data scraped from the platform, but the company stressed that the information is publicly available, and that the database includes data from a number of sites.
“While we are still examining this issue, the published database apparently includes publicly available information obtained from LinkedIn, in combination with data aggregated from other websites or companies,” said Insider, a LinkedIn representative.
The social network also issued a statement, emphasising that the incident is not a LinkedIn data breach, and that private account data of the service’s users did not make it into the database.
The database itself contains names, email addresses, phone numbers, job information, gender, and other details.
According to Cyber News, the hacker valued the full database at a four-figure sum, with payment reportedly in bitcoins.
Earlier on one hacker forum, personal data of more than 533 million Facebook users was published.
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