Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn has faced a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online. This comes on the back of huge data leak of 533 million Facebook users (including 6.1 million Indians). 

An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular hacker forum. Another 2 million records have been leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the hack. 

The leaked data up on sale includes LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, links to other social media profiles, professional titles and other work-related data, reports CyberNews. 

“While users on the hacker forum can view the leaked samples for about $2 worth of forum credits, the threat actor appears to be auctioning the much-larger 500 million user database for at least a four-digit sum, presumably in Bitcoin,” the report mentions. 

LinkedIn said in a statement on Thursday that it has “investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and has determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies”. 

“It does include publicly-viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn. This was not a LinkedIn data breach, and no private member account data from LinkedIn was included in what we have been able to review,” the company said. 

The CyberNews report, however, claims that the data has been scraped from LinkedIn.