LinkedIn denies data leak of 500 million users

Last week, a database appeared on the network, allegedly containing the personal data of 500 million LinkedIn users, but the company denies this data leak.

When major media began writing about this leakage, LinkedIn released a statement in which it said that there was no leak. The fact is that the hacker’s database contains only publicly available information that was copied from the LinkedIn website and which users deliberately published in their profiles.

“This is not a LinkedIn data leak. Among the information we were able to view, there was no private data from LinkedIn accounts”, — the company said in a statement.

The Record also studied this “leak”, and journalists came to the same conclusion as the LinkedIn security team: the dump consists of public information taken from user profiles.

It must be said that the same thing happened last week, when many media reported about the data breach of Clubhouse users. In this case, the attacker collected public data from Clubhouse profiles and shared it on a hacker forum, claiming to have hacked the app’s site. A number of news agencies considered the hacker’s allegations to be true and reported a data breach.

“The Clubhouse breach story is nonsense. It’s like saying Google hacked Twitter as they store people’s Twitter usernames and follower counts. This is *really* benign data, I don’t think anyone in this is losing any sleep over it (unless they totally misunderstood what adding all this info to Clubhouse so that it’s publicly searchable meant). Certainly nothing in here that’s useful to @haveibeenpwned”, — IS specialists Kevin Beaumont wrote in his Twitter.

I would like to remind you that leaks can be quite harmless. For example, we wrote about the fact that Vulnerability in Android app GO SMS Pro leaks data exchanged between users, as well as about Kawasaki Heavy Industries Corp. affected by Hacking and Data Leakage. And more recently that Major Adult Content Leak Detected From OnlyFans Platform.