Data breach

LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) data breach

125,698,496 accounts · breached April 8, 2021

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.

Description by Have I Been Pwned

What data leaked

  • Education levels
  • Email addresses
  • Genders
  • Geographic locations
  • Job titles
  • Names
  • Social media profiles

What to do if you had an account

  1. Turn on two-step sign-in. Enable two-factor authentication where the service offers it, preferably with an authenticator app or a passkey. A leaked password alone is then not enough to get in.
  2. Expect targeted phishing. Leaked contact details are used to write convincing fake messages that mention the breached company or your real name. Do not click links in unexpected emails or texts about this account; go to the site by typing its address.

Check your email at haveibeenpwned.com

We do not run email lookups ourselves. The search is done on haveibeenpwned.com, the service this list comes from.

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