LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) data breach: 125.7M accounts exposed
Severity: high · Patch status: no-fix-needed · Since 2021-10-02
During the first half of 2021, LinkedIn was targeted by attackers who scraped data from hundreds of millions of public profiles and later sold them online. Whilst the scraping did not constitute a data breach nor did it access any personal data not intended to be publicly accessible, the data was still monetised and later broadly circulated in hacking circles. The scraped data contains approximately 400M records with 125M unique email addresses, as well as names, geographic locations, genders and job titles. LinkedIn specifically addresses the incident in their post on An update on report of scraped data. Exposed data: education levels, email addresses, genders, geographic locations, job titles, names, social media profiles. The breach dates from Apr 8, 2021; Have I Been Pwned loaded it on Oct 2, 2021.
What to do
- If you had a LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) account, change its password and the password of any other account that reused it.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
- Check whether your addresses are in this breach at https://haveibeenpwned.com.
Sources
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