Professional networking platform LinkedIn on Tuesday denied that the data of its 700 million users was compromised in a hacking attempt. LinkedIn, in a statement, said that private member data was not exposed.
“Our teams have investigated a set of alleged LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale. We want to be clear that this is not a data breach and no private LinkedIn member data was exposed,” LinkedIn said on its website.
“Our initial investigation has found that this data was scraped from LinkedIn and other various websites and includes the same data reported earlier this year in our April 2021 scraping update,” the statement further added.
“Members trust LinkedIn with their data, and any misuse of our members’ data, such as scraping, violates LinkedIn terms of service,” the company added.
LinkedIn also posted a link to their page when the company has listed prohibited software and extensions.
It said it does not permit the use of any third-party software, including “crawlers”, bots, browser plug-ins, or browser extensions (also called “add-ons”).
“In order to keep our members’ data safe, we’re constantly working to improve our technical measures and defenses against the operation of scraping, automation, and other tools that abuse LinkedIn’s platform,” the company said.
LinkedIn‘s data breach was announced by an alleged hacker on June 22. He also offered the data of users for sale, according to a report by RestorePrivacy, Hindustan Times reported.
The earlier report stated that the data contained email addresses, full names, phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation records, LinkedIn username and profile URL, personal and professional experience or background, genders, and other social media accounts and usernames.