Another data breach – This time the victim is LinkedIn. Sensitive data pertaining to 500 million LinkedIn users has been hacked and leaked online. The dataset includes sensitive information like email address, phone number, workplace information, full name, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details.

LinkedIn has over 740 million users.

Hence, a 500 million user data leak would amount to two-third of the complete database leaked!

“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,” a LinkedIn spokesperson said. “Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data.”

However, later, LinkedIn denied the data leak saying that the data leaked appeared to have been scraped from the professional networking website. As of now there is no estimate figure as to, how many India profiles are hacked.

The hacker, who hasn’t been identified yet, has also listed some data for sale, just as a proof to confirm the data leak.

Last week, 533,000,000 Facebook user data was leaked online, and that too for free! This means that if you have a Facebook account, it’s extremely likely that the phone number associated with the account was leaked.

How to protect yourself from data leak?

To protect your account from data leaks, make sure that you don’t click on any suspicious malware links sent by strangers to your inbox, and make sure to regularly change passwords of your social media accounts as well as email accounts.

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