LinkedIn Explains Data Scraping Amid Reports of More Data Hacks and Breaches

Over the past few months, there have been various reports of significant LinkedIn data hacks, with huge databases of user info being sold on the dark web, available to the highest bidder. Back in April, Cyber News reported that personal data scraped from 500 million LinkedIn users was being made available for sale on various hacking forums, while just last month, another set, reportedly incorporating info from 700 million LinkedIn profiles, also became available online. In each case, LinkedIn has denied that these indicate a breach of its security, instead pointing to ‘data scraping’ as the culprit, the (mostly legal) process of gathering publicly available info from platforms, at scale, in order to build larger data sets by incorporating that material with other sources. As LinkedIn explained in response to the most recent reported leak: “Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn, and other various websites, and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update.” Yet,…
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