The hacker sells the personal data of about 2/3 of the subscribers of the largest network of professional contacts, Fortune.com reports .
This is the second huge social media database put up for sale recently. A previously unknown hacker on a clandestine forum offered personal information to approximately 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries.
This time, according to research group Cyber News, the hacking forum sells data from about 500 million LinkedIn subscribers, including sensitive information such as full names, email addresses, phone numbers and various career information. Researchers have verified that confidential information presented on the dark net is associated with LinkedIn accounts. True, it is not yet clear how fresh this data is and how it was obtained by the cyber criminals.
In its official statement, the LinkedIn network notes that the database collected by unknown persons includes information from user accounts, but in fact it is a collection of records obtained from several sources.
That is, it is likely that the attackers compiled sets of records stolen from a number of web services and companies. At the same time, no hacking of the internal LinkedIn databases happened, the hackers collected information about users from open profiles, insist representatives of the social network.
Cybersecurity experts emphasize that the available data set is sufficient to carry out sophisticated attacks. In particular, using email addresses and phone numbers, hackers can send users emails that mimic business mail, but contain malicious attachments.