Personal data of more than 700 millions of people are for sale on a hacking forum. These stolen data include full names, phone numbers, emails and even physical addresses. Very juicy information for those criminals who wish to carry out identity theft in the future.
Restoreprivacy, the researchers who found this information and whose website promotes online security and privacy, has raised the impact to about 756 millions of profiles, after an exposure that occurred in April of 500 millions of users affected. In this way, the figure rises to a 92% of platform users.
To prove the authenticity of the data, the author has published a file that contains data from 1 million profiles. The file contains complete data of email addresses, Full Names, phone numbers, Addresses, professional experience, other social networks of the user.
Restoreprivacy has also indicated that no passwords have been exposed, fortunately. While it is true that the leaked data matches real data from LinkedIn profiles. Some data that could be used in the future to impersonate identities or prepare highly personalized phishing attacks.
According to the hacker who posted the message on the forum, the data was obtained through the exploitation of LinkedIn’s own API, doing more or less what a LinkedIn developer would do to perform a backup. This technique is also known by the name of “Web Scraping”.
LinkedIn, for its part, ensures that no data breach of its users has occurred, since no private user data has been exposed. Anyway, they will continue investigating, as extracting data from LinkedIn violates its policies. The company continuously works to guarantee the privacy of its members, they assure.
As we always advise, we must be careful with the personal information we publish online, in cases like this, an exposure can lead to more serious attacks. At last, let's remember one of our previous articles explaining how to check if our information has been compromised.
You can consult it at this link:How to check if your passwords have been compromised?
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