A hacker appears to be selling a giant stash of LinkedIn user data that was scraped from the networking website and other places, according to the company and a report.
The database purportedly containing info from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been listed for sale on a popular hacker forum, CyberNews reported.
The hacker is seeking a four-figure sum for the full cache of names, email addresses, phone numbers and other information, but a sample of 2 million leaked records is available to view for about $2 worth of credits, according to the outlet.
LinkedIn confirmed the leak Thursday, but said it did not stem from a data breach of the platform.
The database was aggregated from several websites and companies, though it does include public profile data “that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn,” the Microsoft-owned firm said in a statement.
“This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we’ve been able to review,” said the statement, which did not say how many users were affected.
“When anyone tries to take member data and use it for purposes LinkedIn and our members haven’t agreed to, we work to stop them and hold them accountable,” it added.
It’s unclear whether the data for sale was pulled from up-to-date LinkedIn profiles, according to CyberNews.
News of the leak came just days after Facebook acknowledged that data from more than 530 million users had been leaked online in an unsecured database.
The social network said “malicious actors” scraped the data from its platform prior to September 2019, adding that it’s fixed the vulnerability that allowed them to do so. But the company told Reuters it did not plan to notify the users who were affected.