As technology has evolved we have benefited off it with the new and advance things it offers but with the growing technology one thing that is also growing online is cybercrimes and recently a lot of companies and individuals are falling victims to such dark activities on the web.
One such company which very recently fell into the unfortunate trap of cybercrime is none other than one of the most popular job seeking website called “LinkedIn”. LinkedIn fell victim to this massive breach and firstly this news was reported by CyberNews, and LinkedIn later confirmed the breach to Business Insider.
Upon further investigation, the company revealed that the data of around 500 million users present on the platform has been compromised. Keeping in mind that LinkedIn has a user strength of 750 million which means that more than two third of the user data on the website was compromised. The data which was hacked and scarped out of the website by the hacker is quite crucial and personal including the users email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details and it has been reported that this data is being sold online.
It was revealed that the hacker who had managed to scrape off information from the website is selling this information on a hacker forum and has posted around 200 million data information set on that forum as a proof to let the company know that he is withholding further information as well. The unknown hacker has asked for around four-digit amount (in USD) in exchange for the breached data, potentially in the form of Bitcoins. According to the company they are looking into this matter and what they have gathered up until now is that the dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies.
This is not the first time that any company in the recent times have been hacked like this because just a few months ago data of about 500 million Facebook users was leaked. According to a spokesperson of Facebook the dataset was breached due to a vulnerability patched two years ago.
If you are someone who is afraid of their data being compromised online, we suggest you to follow the following steps.
Firstly, always make sure that the application you use, you thoroughly look into the apps security, and privacy settings and make sure you have set them up properly. Secondly be cautious while sharing any personal data online and occasionally change your account passwords across platforms. This may not help with the wide app breaching but it will ensure your account does not get hack.
Photo: Shutterstock / wichayada suwanachun
Read next: Hackers are baiting spear phishing attacks with LinkedIn information
One such company which very recently fell into the unfortunate trap of cybercrime is none other than one of the most popular job seeking website called “LinkedIn”. LinkedIn fell victim to this massive breach and firstly this news was reported by CyberNews, and LinkedIn later confirmed the breach to Business Insider.
Upon further investigation, the company revealed that the data of around 500 million users present on the platform has been compromised. Keeping in mind that LinkedIn has a user strength of 750 million which means that more than two third of the user data on the website was compromised. The data which was hacked and scarped out of the website by the hacker is quite crucial and personal including the users email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, full names, account IDs, links to their social media accounts, and gender details and it has been reported that this data is being sold online.
It was revealed that the hacker who had managed to scrape off information from the website is selling this information on a hacker forum and has posted around 200 million data information set on that forum as a proof to let the company know that he is withholding further information as well. The unknown hacker has asked for around four-digit amount (in USD) in exchange for the breached data, potentially in the form of Bitcoins. According to the company they are looking into this matter and what they have gathered up until now is that the dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies.
This is not the first time that any company in the recent times have been hacked like this because just a few months ago data of about 500 million Facebook users was leaked. According to a spokesperson of Facebook the dataset was breached due to a vulnerability patched two years ago.
If you are someone who is afraid of their data being compromised online, we suggest you to follow the following steps.
Firstly, always make sure that the application you use, you thoroughly look into the apps security, and privacy settings and make sure you have set them up properly. Secondly be cautious while sharing any personal data online and occasionally change your account passwords across platforms. This may not help with the wide app breaching but it will ensure your account does not get hack.
Photo: Shutterstock / wichayada suwanachun
Read next: Hackers are baiting spear phishing attacks with LinkedIn information
