A new offering with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared on a popular hacker forum located on the Dark Web. Analysts from Privacy Sharks stumbled across the data put up for sale on RaidForums by a hacker going by the name of “GOD User TomLiner.” The advertisement, posted June 22, claims that 700 million records are included in the cache, and included a sample of 1 million records as “proof of concept.”
Privacy Sharks examined the free sample and saw that the records include full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers and industry information. It’s unclear what the origin of the data is – but the scraping of public profiles is a probable source. That was the medium used in the collection of 500 million LinkedIn records that went up for sale last April. It contained an “aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies” as well “publicly viewable member profile data,” LinkedIn said.
According to LinkedIn, no breach of its networks has occurred this time, either:
“While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources,” according to the company’s press statement. “This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”