500 Million LinkedIn Users' Data Were Allegedly Hacked

Just days after more than 500 million Facebook account credentials were leaked, it's now LinkedIn's turn to sit in the hot seat. 

With people barely recovering from Facebook's news, CyberNews has now reported that hackers scraped data from 500 million LinkedIn accounts. Allegedly, the culprits are now selling the information on a hacker forum, and have already posted two million of the profiles as proof that they have the information.

The accounts, CyberNews says, are being sold for at least a four-digit sum, with Bitcoin most likely accepted as payment.

Given LinkedIn says it has nearly 740 million members, that means roughly two-thirds of its accounts have been scraped. 

What LinkedIn has said about the data scrape

LinkedIn issued a statement saying it's investigated the alleged data scrape and has "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," it read. 

LinkedIn's comments make us believe that perhaps the scraped data only includes publicly accessible information from account users' LinkedIn profiles. 

And as CyberNews checked on the hacker platform selling the data, the leaked information supposedly includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email address, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media platforms, and professional titles and other work-related data. 

LinkedIn hasn't yet reached out to the account holders who may have had their information leaked, and it's unclear whether they will, says The Verge.

In the meantime, CyberNews recommends that users use its personal data leak checker to see if their data is on the list, stay aware of suspicious LinkedIn messages or new connections, change their LinkedIn and email passwords, and look into using a password manager to keep all passwords safe.