LinkedIn users' data 'extracted, posted for sale'

LinkedIn has slightly over half a billion profiles. [File, Standard]

Some LinkedIn data, including publicly viewable member profile, has been extracted and posted for sale, Microsoft Corp’s professional networking site said based on an investigation.

The incident was not a data breach and no private member account data from the platform was included, LinkedIn said in a blog post on Thursday, adding that the information on sale is a collection of data from a number of websites and companies.

LinkedIn did not immediately respond to Reuters request for more details on the incident, including the number of users affected.

CyberNews had reported on April 6 that an archive of data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles was put for sale on a popular hacker forum.

Earlier this week, Facebook Inc said “malicious actors” had obtained data prior to September 2019 by “scraping” profiles using a vulnerability in the platform’s tool for syncing contacts.

The world’s largest social network did not notify more than 530 million users whose details were obtained through the misuse and recently made public in a database, and does not have plans to do so, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.