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Update:
- LinkedIn has settled a lawsuit against a Singapore-based company it accused of scraping and selling customer data. The company, Mantheos Ptd. Ltd, agreed to be permanently restrained and barred from the practice.
- On Feb. 1, LinkedIn filed a federal lawsuit against Mantheos and its founders for the unauthorized scraping of millions of LinkedIn member profiles.
- On May 9, a California federal judge signed off on a deal between the parties.
- The private information of approximately 700 million LinkedIn users reportedly was exposed in the June 2021 scrape.
- The settlement did not include any money, and Mantheos did not admit to any liability but did admit to gathering member data from LinkedIn Corp.
- “Defendants represent that they have destroyed all LinkedIn member profile data, whether stored in electronic form or otherwise, in their possession, custody or control and have certified in writing that they have done so,” the settlement said.
(June 30, 2021)
The private information of approximately 700 million LinkedIn users was reportedly exposed in the second data breach to hit the company in a span of months.
Cybercriminals claimed to have hacked the career networking website last week, according to Privacy Sharks, and posted one million of the records they collected as proof. The leaked records appear to include many LinkedIn users’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, personal and professional information, gender, social media information, and, in some cases, their “inferred” salaries.
The company has since issued a response to Privacy Sharks, who broke the story earlier this week, contending that a LinkedIn data breach did not occur.
“While we’re still investigating this issue, our initial analysis indicates that the dataset includes information scraped from LinkedIn as well as information obtained from other sources,” a LinkedIn representative reportedly told Privacy Shark. “This was not a LinkedIn data breach and our investigation has determined that no private LinkedIn member data was exposed. Scraping data from LinkedIn is a violation of our Terms of Service and we are constantly working to ensure our members’ privacy is protected.”
In a different statement, LinkedIn explains that a data scrape, rather than a breach occurred.
“We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies,” says the statement. “It does include publicly viewable member profile data that appears to have been scraped from LinkedIn.”
Indeed, the information exposed can still be used by cybercriminals to commit identity theft or fraud.
Further, this incident occurs on the heels of another data breach that exposed the information of 500 million LinkedIn users, reports 9To5 Mac. In that instance, LinkedIn reportedly confirmed that the data breach included information from its servers, as well as from other websites.
Was your information exposed in a LinkedIn data breach? You can tell us about in the comment section below and also look into whether you qualify for a LinkedIn data breach class action lawsuit investigation!
The LinkedIn Data Breach Lawsuit is LinkedIn Corp. v. Mantheos Pte. Ltd., Case No. 4:22-cv-00651, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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92 thoughts onLinkedIn Data Breach Lawsuit Settled By Barring Singapore-Based Scraper
Please add my name. Thank you.
My information was exposed in a LinkedIn data breach and I was notified by credit karma monitoring and my mcafee identity theft protection app as well
I found my email on the dark web site and that LinkedIn was it. I haven’t used it since 2013 or 2014.