LinkedIn denies data breach that allegedly exposed data of 700 million users, says 'members trust us'

LinkedIn users were allegedly hit by a massive data breach recently, where data of 700 million users was hacked.

First spotted by Restore Privacy, the data of around 92 percent of LinkedIn users was reportedly put up for sale on the dark web. However, LinkedIn denies any such breach and has assured that "no private LinkedIn member data was exposed".

As per an official statement, "Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and 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."

Reportedly, an unknown hacker got access to details like phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, and inferred salaries of LinkedIn users. 9to5Mac reached out to the hacker who had posted the details on the dark web. The hacker reportedly revealed that the data "was obtained by exploiting the LinkedIn API to harvest information that people upload to the site".

Notably, this is not the first time that the personal details of LinkedIn users are compromised. Back in April this year, an individual selling the data including full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders and more on a hacker forum claimed that it was scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles. To this, LinkedIn said that data included information from many places and wasn’t all scraped from its platform. It further confirmed that the data compromised was easily available on the public LinkedIn profiles.

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