LinkedIn's 500 million members' data leaked! These tricks will teach you how to protect your account data
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 4:21 am
Recently, a big event happened in the social media industry. I believe that many foreign trade people have also heard about it. Xiaoman was also shocked when he heard it: the data of more than 500 million users on the LinkedIn platform was leaked!
You should know that LinkedIn currently has 756 million members worldwide, which means that more than half of the members' data has been leaked and sold publicly by hackers. This is really frightening to think about, and it makes people lose their appetite!
After all, this is a major event concerning member data, and LinkedIn officials quickly issued a statement:
Official: This is not a LinkedIn data breach!
LinkedIn official statement
LinkedIn data breach statement (English version)
Screenshot source: LinkedIn official
The official statement is roughly translated as follows:
The data purportedly released for sale is actually an haiti b2b leads aggregate of data from many websites and companies. It also does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This is not a LinkedIn data breach, and the content we were able to review does not include LinkedIn private member account data.
Emm... According to LinkedIn's official response, let me explain it in a simple and easy-to-understand way:
Yes, it is true. But the leaked data is not only from LinkedIn. Even the data that seems to be from LinkedIn was originally publicly available. So how can this be called a LinkedIn data leak? We are innocent!
Ada expression pack
OK, let’s take a look at what exactly LinkedIn claims is included in the “publicly viewable member profile data” .
LinkedIn leaked data watermark version
Wow, let’s not talk about anything else, just looking at the email address and other social media information , generally you need to add the other party as a contact and the other party must approve it before you can see it.
It would be a bit biased to say that this is "publicly viewable member profile data ." After all, this is not directly available to all LinkedIn members.
You should know that LinkedIn currently has 756 million members worldwide, which means that more than half of the members' data has been leaked and sold publicly by hackers. This is really frightening to think about, and it makes people lose their appetite!
After all, this is a major event concerning member data, and LinkedIn officials quickly issued a statement:
Official: This is not a LinkedIn data breach!
LinkedIn official statement
LinkedIn data breach statement (English version)
Screenshot source: LinkedIn official
The official statement is roughly translated as follows:
The data purportedly released for sale is actually an haiti b2b leads aggregate of data from many websites and companies. It also does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This is not a LinkedIn data breach, and the content we were able to review does not include LinkedIn private member account data.
Emm... According to LinkedIn's official response, let me explain it in a simple and easy-to-understand way:
Yes, it is true. But the leaked data is not only from LinkedIn. Even the data that seems to be from LinkedIn was originally publicly available. So how can this be called a LinkedIn data leak? We are innocent!
Ada expression pack
OK, let’s take a look at what exactly LinkedIn claims is included in the “publicly viewable member profile data” .
LinkedIn leaked data watermark version
Wow, let’s not talk about anything else, just looking at the email address and other social media information , generally you need to add the other party as a contact and the other party must approve it before you can see it.
It would be a bit biased to say that this is "publicly viewable member profile data ." After all, this is not directly available to all LinkedIn members.