Data from over half a billion LinkedIn users has been scraped and posted online for sale to hackers

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Data from more than half a billion LinkedIn users has been scrapped and is being sold online to hackers. This is the second major cybersecurity incident that occurred this month, following news of a similar incident involving Facebook where 533 million users’ personal data were leaked online.

LinkedIn confirmed the latest incident but said it was not a data breach and that no private member account data from the platform was included.

“We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” the Microsoft Corp’s professional networking site wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

The data includes user IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, professional titles, and other work-related data, Cybernews reported.

According to Fortune Magazine, although the scraped LinkedIn data doesn’t contain sensitive information like bank account details such as credit card information or Social Security numbers, it does include data that could help bad actors perform other sophisticated hacking attempts. For instance, hackers could use data like email addresses and phone numbers to conduct more convincing phishing attacks, in which they send people bogus emails that look real but contain links to malicious websites.