LinkedIn: User records still available, API abuse denied

A sales offer with data from over 700 million – and thus almost all – users of the LinkedIn platform, which has been in a hacker forum since the beginning of last week, is still active. This was shown by a contact by heise Security with the seller “Tom Liner” on Wednesday: For US $ 5,000 as a basis for negotiations, he is still offering information about LinkedIn users, not all of which are publicly available on the user profiles. In an official statement, LinkedIn has denied a leak in the classic sense as well as possible weaknesses in a LinkedIn API. The data was only collected from the public user profiles by so-called “scraping”. All non-publicly viewable data in the offer should therefore come from other sources. Heise Security published a detailed report on the incident yesterday, Tuesday. Among other things, we had a “taste” published by Tom Liner under the microscope with over 400 user data records, which contained, among other things, full names, email and postal addresses, location data, telephone numbers as well as LinkedIn user names and profile URLs as well as information on gender, personal and professional career and other social media accounts of the…
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