LinkedIn, the American business and employment-oriented online service, has suffered a huge data breach for the second time this year, exposing data related to about 700 million users.
The data that has been compromised includes residential addresses, e-mail addresses, contact numbers, other social-media accounts, salary information and geolocation records too, which are at a risk of being misused.
Over 92 per cent of LinkedIn users have been impacted. It has been discovered that a hacker even tried to sell user data online, and posted a sample of at least a million records on a hacking forum. The hacker apparently got the data from the platform’s application programming interface (API).
About two months ago, a similar data breach had led to the theft of data pertaining to about 500 million LinkedIn users.
LinkedIn, however, maintains that it isn’t actually a data breach but involves publicly viewable profile data being scraped from the Linkedin network. It has stated that no private data of any of its members has been exposed or put to risk.
The platform is reportedly trying to get to the root of the matter, and is yet to issue an official statement. Scraping of data, of course, violates LinkedIn’s terms of service, and therefore, the platform claims that it will leave no stone unturned to ensure that the privacy of its users’ data is always maintained and protected.
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