LinkedIn says some user data scraped and posted for sale

LinkedIn said that the information on the sale is a collection of data from a number of websites and companies

Some LinkedIn data, including publicly viewable member profiles, has been scraped and posted for sale, Microsoft Corp’s professional networking site said based on an investigation.

The incident was not a data breach and no private member account data from the platform was included, LinkedIn said in a blog post on Thursday, adding that the information on the sale is a collection of data from a number of websites and companies.

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LinkedIn declined to provide more details on the incident, including the number of users affected.

CyberNews had reported on April 6 that an archive of data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles was put for sale on a popular hacker forum.

Earlier this week, Facebook said, “malicious actors” had obtained data prior to September 2019 by “scraping” profiles using a vulnerability in the platform’s tool for syncing contacts.

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The world’s largest social network did not notify more than 530 million users whose details were obtained through the misuse and recently made public in a database, and does not have plans to do so, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.

Social networks including Facebook and Twitter have been under fire over how they handle user privacy across their platforms.

In 2019, Facebook reached a landmark settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission over its investigation into allegations the company misused user data.

Reporting by Akanksha Rana and Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur