Security News Data from 2.5M LinkedIn Premium Users Freely Shared on Hacking Forum

[CyberTech]

Content source

https://restoreprivacy.com/linkedin-user-data-scrape-leak-shared-on-hacking-forum/

A database containing 2.5 million rows of data on LinkedIn Premium users is shared for free on a popular clearnet hacking forum.

Scraping is the process of using automated tools to extract large amounts of data from websites, typically involving crawlers and bots that can evade anti-scraping measures by mimicking human-like user behavior.

Although scraping constitutes a violation of the terms of service on LinkedIn, which the job-oriented social media platform has fought in court for, many threat actors continue to engage in the activity to demonstrate their capacity to bypass protections or to make a profit.

In this case, user ‘USDoD’ has freely shared the CSV database, which contains recent (2023) data for LinkedIn Premium users, including the following information, among other things:

Data from 2.5M LinkedIn Premium Users Freely Shared on Hacking Forum

A database containing 2.5 million rows of data on LinkedIn Premium users is shared for free on a popular clearnet hacking forum.

restoreprivacy.com

 

[vtqhtr413]

I like to think of investigating data breaches as a sort of scientific search for truth. You start out with a theory (a set of data coming from an alleged source), but you don't have a vested interested in whether the claim is true or not, rather you follow the evidence and see where it leads. Verification that supports the alleged source is usually quite straightforward, but disproving a claim can be a rather time consuming exercise, especially when a dataset contains fragments of truth mixed in with data that is anything but. Which is what we have here today.

Hackers, Scrapers & Fakers: What's Really Inside the Latest LinkedIn Dataset

Edit (1 day later): After posting this, the party responsible for leaking the data turned around and said "that was only a small part of it, here's the whole thing", and released records encompassing a further 14M records. I've added those into HIBP and will shortly be re-sending notifications to

www.troyhunt.com

 

[ForgottenSeer 103564]

Hackers, Scrapers & Fakers: What's Really Inside the Latest LinkedIn Dataset

Edit (1 day later): After posting this, the party responsible for leaking the data turned around and said "that was only a small part of it, here's the whole thing", and released records encompassing a further 14M records. I've added those into HIBP and will shortly be re-sending notifications to

www.troyhunt.com

What we have here is users data is not a concern of the company, bottom line is. It takes man hours, time, money ect to patch CVE's on these severs they maintain, and time down cost just as well, and because of correct procedures as to securing information and keeping these servers up to date does not happen like it should, they skirt the issue with one intention in mind and that is obtaining what they want.