After Facebook, LinkedIn suffers data leak of 500 million users

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.

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 Inc said: “malicious actors” had obtained data prior to September 2019 by “scraping” profiles using a vulnerability in the platform`s tool for syncing contacts.

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.