11 April 21, 11:57
Quote:Personal data from more than 500 million LinkedIn users has been posted for sale online in yet another incident of threat actors scraping data from public profiles and slinging it online for potential cybercriminal misuse.
Hackers posted an archive containing data they said includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, professional titles, email addresses, phone numbers and other personally identifiable information (PII) on a popular hacker forum, according to a report in CyberNews on Tuesday.
The LinkedIn incident comes on the heels of a substantial leak of personal data from more than 533 million Facebook users last weekend.
The data set also includes links to LinkedIn profiles and other social-media profiles, according to the report. Moreover, to prove the authenticity of the info and provide a teaser of the data inside, the hackers responsible also leaked another 2 million records as a proof-of-concept sample, the report said.
Users on the forum can view the samples for about $2 worth of forum credits. However, the threat actor also appears to be auctioning off the crown jewel of the data-gathering — the 500-million-user database — for at a sum that is at least in the four-digit range, most likely in a Bitcoin equivalent, according to the report.
“As the leaked data contains no payment card details and no passwords, it’s of less value to attackers and won’t sell for much on the Dark Web anyway,” Candid Wuest, Acronis vice president of cyber-protection research, said via email. “However, it does contain valuable personal information (workplace info, email, social account links), which is why it’s not published it for free.”
Read more: Data from 500M LinkedIn Users Posted for Sale Online | Threatpost