92% of LinkedIn data leaked on RaidForums

Data on around 700 million users of LinkedIn, a social media platform for professionals, was leaked and currently on sale on RaidForums. The hacker posted one million samples of user data to prove the claim. The dataset includes full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers and industry information.

LinkedIn on Tuesday, 29 June issued a statement on its website. “Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed,” the statement read. According to LinkedIn, the data on RaidForums was scraped from LinkedIn and other websites. The company faced a similar incident in April.

Data scraping is a process of manually extracting data from a website interface using a software or tool. The simplest example would be copying and pasting the directory of a website into a spreadsheet. In LinkedIn case, the hacker could have extracted information from user profiles and compiled the data on a file.