LinkedIn Database Leak ! How will the leak affect the users?

LinkedIn database leak of more than 500M global users are found on sale in a hacker forum after following the data breach of Facebook in 2021.

The users on the forum are able to see about $2 worth form credits as a proof sample of the leak and they can buy the whole data dump for 4 digit price when auctioned.

This is not a new practice, but these types of tech companies always fail to protect the vulnerability of user data. Over 500M LinkedIn profiles were scraped.

LinkedIn Database Leak Details 

The leaked details include

• LinkedIn email IDs
• User location
• Associated Phone numbers
• Email address
• Gender details
• Workplace location
• Employment Details
• and Associated social media accounts.

Cyber News Team immediately spotted this incident. The company LinkedIn has said that the files were illegally obtained from their website.

Also, the hackers may have done scraping using automated bots and accumulated the data before putting them online.

How will the leak affect the users?

This massive exposed data will be useful for all the scammers and spammers out there if they achieved the data before the control.

• They will be able to carry out phishing attacks.
• You can see your emails flooded with spam messages.
• Also many may Brute-force your passwords.

See Here About The Phishing Attacks: Stay safe from online phishing attacks

How you can secure your account?

Following are some tips you may take into consideration to be safe from data leaks like LinkedIn database leaks.

• Change your password as soon as you found out about any of the breaches.
• If you found your details leaked in a data breach, make sure that your identification documents like Citizenship Card, Driver’s License and Passport details have not leaked. So change those details as soon as you found out.
• Always keep a strong password including numeric, and alphabets with both the cases and symbols. If it becomes difficult to remember them for you, use secure password managers available online like Keep. Or, you can write them in your personal pocket notebook and keep them away from others.
• Always set up two-factor authentication for your logins with your devices.
• As a security measure, you can change your email password every month and log out from all devices and all sessions once.
• If you seldom use LinkedIn and want to protect the data you have made online, you may consider quitting social media and deleting your account. However, above mentioned methods can probably save your data from being compromised easily. Therefore, you can consider not quitting.
• Do not click any suspicious links or do not click any links that pop up while surfing your internet that you might not need. Also, avoid the links sent to you by unknown people to your inbox.
• Your data may also be leaked due to inefficiency and insufficient security measures practised by the tech companies, Internet Service Providers and other companies you rely on for the internet.

Conclusion:

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. LinkedIn failed in its security measure to prevent the attack.

Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn’s terms of service. When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes that our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable.

While we’re still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies.

Scraping our member’s data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data. So basically it depends on what we use, how we use and how much risk we take.