First Facebook and now LinkedIn, what’s next? Instagram? Snapchat? The term data privacy is becoming a joke day after day apparently. Coming back to LinkedIn, data of about 500 million users has been found to be on sale online. The data is reported to contain email addresses, phone numbers, links to other social media profiles, and all of the professional details of the user.
The leak was found in a popular forum for hackers. The asking price was a four-digit sum minimum. The hackers even put up the data for 2 million people as a sample for just 2$ to prove that the data was legit. The leak was reported by CyberNews researchers, who were also able to confirm that the sample data was actually real. They said that “it’s unclear whether the threat actor is selling up-to-date LinkedIn profiles, or if the data has been taken or aggregated from a previous breach suffered by LinkedIn or other companies.”
Now 500 million users is a lot so if you have a LinkedIn account then chances are your data has been compromised. The only thing you could and should do now is to change your password and also the password of the email account you used. If you’ve used that same password for other social media accounts then change those as well.
The other thing you can do is to enable 2-factor authentication, which looking at the situation nowadays looks redundant as the data is still being leaked anyways. According to CyberNews, “Particularly determined attackers can combine information found in the leaked files with other data breaches in order to create detailed profiles of their potential victims. With such information in hand, they can stage much more convincing phishing and social engineering attacks or even commit identity theft against the people whose information has been exposed on the hacker forum”.
At this point in time, I don’t really care that my data is possibly inside two datasets being sold. One from Facebook and the other from LinkedIn. As long I keep vigilant for all the scam emails and messages. Those, by the way, have increased lately.