Just two months after 500 million LinkedIn users were affected in a data-scraping incident, the company has suffered from another similar incident that has big security ramifications. According to researchers at Privacy Sharks, a new posting with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared on a popular hacker forum called RaidForums. The advertisement was posted by a user going by the name “GOD User TomLiner,” and the ad claims that 700 million records are included in the cache. 1 million records were provided for free as proof. The posting was made on June 22, according to researchers.
Privacy Sharks analysts examined the sample and found that the records included industry information, full names, gender, email addresses, and phone numbers. It is unclear what the origin of the data is, however, the scraping of public profiles is a likely source for the massive amount of data. This was the culprit behind the previous incident, which occurred in April. The data in that instance contained an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies, along with publicly viewable member profile data from LinkedIn. LinkedIn confirmed that it does not appear that their network has suffered from a breach.
Read More: Data for 700M LinkedIn Users Posted for Sale in Cyber-Underground
