Price Tag for Our LinkedIn Data Revealed

LinkedIn is unlikely to regard 2021 as a successful year. First, in April, the data of 500 million users of the service was put up for sale, which was reported by the largest media in the world, including CNN. Just two months later an offer was made to buy a package containing data from 700 million accounts, or 92% of LinkedIn's users. The price? A measly $5,000..

The package offered for sale contains a range of potentially sensitive data:

• Email address;
• Name;
• Telephone number;
• Residential address;
• Geolocation data;
• User login and profile address;
• Professional experience and education;
• Gender;
• Usernames of connected social media users.

Announcement of the sale of data of 700 million LinkedIn users. Source: Restore Privacy.

As LinkedIn points out in an official statement, no private user data was stolen and there was no security breach. So how did such detailed information end up in the hands of hackers? Well, they were publicly available and it was the users themselves who published them.

RestorePrivacy conducted an investigation and found that the hackers scraped the data from LinkedIn using its API, which is a legitimate channel for communication with external apps or plugins on the websites. The data obtained in this way was expanded with information from other sources. The authors from RestorePrivacy contacted the seller and found out the price for the chole package, amounting to $5000.

Restore Privacy editors contacted the hacker to find out the price of 700 million users' data. Source: Restore Privacy.

$5000 for such a gigantic database may seem surprisingly low. However, it does not differ significantly from the market reality - according to CyberNews the April database with 500 million accounts was offered for sale for 7000 dollars. From a hacker's perspective, a single user means little, and the increasing capabilities of hardware and the speed of Internet connections make huge databases, analyzed and used in an automated way, increasingly popular.

• Internet
• security
• scandals and controversies
• hackers
• social media
• privacy
• data theft and leaks