Personal information belonging to at least 500 million LinkedIn users is up for sale on a website popular with hackers, the company has confirmed.
LinkedIn users’ Names, user IDs, email addresses, phone numbers, gender, professional titles and links to other social media networks form part of the database currently on sale for a four figure sum.
LinkedIn says the database has been aggregated with information from multiple websites and companies. The company said data up for sale from the professional networking site was publicly available in the users’ profiles.
“This is not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review.” the company said.
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The sale of the data was first reported by CyberNews, a cybersecurity and research website. LinkedIn has about 675 million users in total, meaning that at least three quarters of users have been affected.
LinkedIn says that any misuse of its members’ data, such as scraping violates its terms of service, which “prohibit third-party software, bots, browser extensions or plug-ins” that scrape data from the site.
“When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable,” LinkedIn said in its statement.
The company has not revealed whether it will alert members whose information has been scraped.
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