After PrivacySharks reported a data leak of 700 million LinkedIn users’ records, LinkedIn has released a statement denying the allegations stating that the data is similar to the data leak reports from April 2021. The data breach included personal information of users such as email addresses, full names, phone numbers, addresses, work experiences, inferred salaries, LinkedIn username geo-locations, and profile URL.
In a recent official statement, LinkedIn shared their findings from investigating data breach of users data:
“Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.”
The April 2021 alleged data leak of 500 million user accounts was cited by LinkedIn as a culmination of data from multiple websites and companies:
“Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and we take action to protect that trust. 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.”