An archive containing data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by the post author, mentioned a Cybernews report. This massive breach of privacy comes a few days after the data leak of 533 million Facebook users.

LinkedIn, the world’s largest online professional network, however, in a statement admitted ‘only scraping of publicly viewable member profile data’ and denied any data breach. It claimed ‘no private member account data was included’ in the set of profile information put on sale.

“We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies. It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. 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”, LinkedIn said in a statement.

The leaked data contains full names, email addresses, phone numbers and genders of the LinkedIn members.

The Cybernews reported, while users on the hacker forum can view the leaked samples for about $2 worth of forum credits, the threat actor appears to be auctioning the much-larger 500 million user database for at least a 4-digit sum, presumably in Bitcoin.

The Microsoft owned professional networking platform in its statement added that data scraping violates its terms of services and anyone responsible for this will be held accountable.

“Any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service. 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.”, the LinkedIn statement read.

Earlier, Facebook had also claimed the leaked data of 533 million users was due to the scraping of contact information. The leaked data contained the names, email IDs, birthdays and phone numbers of the users.

(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)