60 Million records of LinkedIn users exposed online

Researcher discovered eight unsecured databases exposed online that contained approximately 60 million records of LinkedIn user data.

Researcher Sanyam Jain at GDI foundation discovered eight unsecured databases exposed online that contained approximately 60 million records of LinkedIn user data.

Most of the data are publicly available, the databases also include the email addresses of the users. The databases also contain internal data, such as the type of LinkedIn subscription a circumstance that suggests that the source could be a data breach.

Records include LinkedIn public profile information, including IDs, profile URLs, work history, education history, location, listed skills, other social profiles, and the last time the profile was updated.

The archives contain 229 GB of data, each one containing between 25 GB and 32 GB of information.

The researcher noticed that the huge trove of data was disappearing and reappearing online under different IP addresses every day.

Finally, the database was no more accessible likely because it was secured.

The mystery behind this discovery is that some users claim to have had
LinkedIn privacy setting configured to avoid publicly displaying some personal details.

“Included in the profile was also my email address that I used when registering my LinkedIn account. It is not known how they gained access to this information as I have always had the LinkedIn privacy setting configured to not publicly display my email address.” reads the post published by BleepingComputer.

“After reviewing the data that was sent to me, I found all of the information to be accurate.”

At the time it is not clear who is the owner of the database, as of Monday, the databases were no longer accessible online.

Paul Rockwell, head of Trust & Safety at LinkedIn, told BleepingComputer that the databases do not belong to them, anyway he confirmed that the company is aware of third-party databases containing scraped LinkedIn data.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, LinkedIn)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.