LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) Data Breach

What happened

During the first half of 2021, LinkedIn was targeted by attackers who scraped data from hundreds of millions of public profiles and later sold them online. Whilst the scraping did not constitute a data breach nor did it access any personal data not intended to be publicly accessible, the data was still monetised and later broadly circulated in hacking circles. The scraped data contains approximately 400M records with 125M unique email addresses, as well as names, geographic locations, genders and job titles. LinkedIn specifically addresses the incident in their post on An update on report of scraped data.

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.