LinkedIn denies alleged data breach targeting 700 million users

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After facing a massive data leak recently, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has reportedly suffered another massive breach, which is said to expose the data of 700 million users globally.

However, the professional networking site has denied it, said a media report. According to the report, the data breach includes information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and industry information.

A user on RaidForums put the data up for sale late last week. It was spotted by the news site Privacy Sharks, who contacted LinkedIn after verifying a 1 million record sample offered by the seller, Forbes reported.

However, the company said "this was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed."

LinkedIn is still investigating but added, "initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources."

"Data shared online by users on various applications, is as vulnerable as the application they are using. Any vulnerability of the application or its API may lead to a breach of your data," Sonit Jain, CEO of GajShield Infotech, told IANS.

"Users should observe a zero-trust policy and not share any confidential data on any public platforms. Enable 2FA and change passwords regularly," Jain added.

Recently, the professional networking platform faced a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online.

An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles had been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the hack.

The leaked data up for sale included LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work-related data.

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