Article DETAILS

Data from over 500 million LinkedIn users is being sold online to hackers, marking the second major cybersecurity incident to be revealed in the past week, following news of a similar occurrence involving Facebook.

LinkedIn is the latest victim of a massive data breach and data of over 500 million of its users has been scraped from the platform and posted online for sale. The dataset includes sensitive information like email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details. The breached data is reportedly being sold by an unknown user on a hacker forum, who has dumped data of over two million users as sample proof. The hacker is asking for a four-digit amount (in USD) in exchange for the breached data, potentially in the form of Bitcoins. LinkedIn has over 740 million users, the company mentions this on its website, which means that data of over two-third of its subscribers has been compromised and being sold online.

Elite CIO Council requests all members to being more cautious while sharing any personal data online, frequently change your account passwords across all platforms. The password should ideally be a strong one and you could save it in a strong password manager for auto-fill. Also enable two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever available, and do not accept connections, especially on LinkedIn and Facebook, from unknown people.