LinkedIn denies mega data breach exposing 700 million profiles

In a statement, LinkedIn said, "This is not a data breach. No private LinkedIn member data was exposed. This data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites. It includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update."

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has rejected reports that claimed that the personal information of some 700 million users had been put up for sale.

In a statement, LinkedIn said that its teams probed allegations that its data has been posted for sale.

In a statement, LinkedIn said, "This is not a data breach. No private LinkedIn member data was exposed. This data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites. It includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update."

The data leak was first reported by Restore Privacy (https://restoreprivacy.com/linkedin-data-leak-700-million-users/) which claimed that information on 92% of LinkedIn users had been leaked.

The report claimed that the hacker was selling the information online and posted a sample of the data on June 22. The sample data contained personal information on 1 million users

When Restore Privacy contacted the hacker via Telegram, it was told that the data had been obtained via the LinkedIn application programming interface.

This is not the first time a LinkedIn data breach has been claimed.

In April 2021, a database was posted for sale on a website popular with hackers, with information scraped from around 500 million LinkedIn user profiles. 

Even back then, the company had said that the data included only information that people listed publicly in their profiles.