LinkedIn denies data breach that reportedly affected 700 million users

Professional networking platform LinkedIn has denied reports of a data breach that allegedly compromised the data of more than 700 million users.

“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 company said in a note posted on its website. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.”

Earlier this week, RestorePrivacy had reported that a hacker was in possession of 700 million records and had posted a sample of 1 million records on a popular hacking forum. The records consisted of information like phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation data, LinkedIn usernames, professional background, and inferred salaries among others. The sample data appeared up to date from 2020 to 2021, it noted.

This follows a similar LinkedIn data leak in April this year that had allegedly impacted 500 million accounts. The leaked data comprised publicly viewable user information like full names, email addresses, phone numbers and workplace information, among others.

The hacker told the publication that data was obtained through LinkedIn’s application programming interface (API).

“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” the company said.