Data for 700M LinkedIn Users Posted for Sale in Cyber-Underground

upstart writes:

Data for 700M LinkedIn Users Posted for Sale in Cyber-Underground:

After 500 million LinkedIn enthusiasts were affected in a data-scraping incident in April, it's happened again - with big security ramifications. A new posting with 700 million LinkedIn records has appeared on a popular hacker forum, according to researchers.

Analysts from Privacy Sharks stumbled across the data put up for sale on RaidForums by a hacker calling himself GOD User TomLiner." The advertisement, posted June 22, claims that 700 million records are included in the cache, and included a sample of 1 million records as proof."

Privacy Sharks examined the free sample and saw that the records include full names, gender, email addresses, phone numbers and industry information. It's unclear what the origin of the data is - but the scraping of public profiles is a likely source. That was the engine behind the collection of 500 million LinkedIn records that went up for sale in April. It contained an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies" as well publicly viewable member profile data," LinkedIn said at the time.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.