Report: hackers scraped data of 500M LinkedIn users and posted it for sale online; LinkedIn confirms the dataset includes publicly viewable info from its site(500m Linkedin Linkedincanalesinsider)

500m Linkedin Linkedincanalesinsider: Even before the Internet and information technology made data breaches the new norm, hackers have always been able to penetrate into computer systems and networks. The more modern version of this is data scraping, a technique that lifts large batches of data from public sources.

LinkedIn is just one example of a company that was recently hacked. According to reports, hackers managed to access at least 500 million LinkedIn accounts – including passwords in some cases – and then posted it for sale online, likely for malicious purposes such as identity theft and spamming campaigns.

The hackers did not just take the passwords, but also the Facebook IDs and email addresses that the users had made public on LinkedIn. The data, including profile pictures and public posts, was put up on Dropbox. Last January, a hacker going by the name ‘Peace’ put up a sample data file on Pastebin, including 165 million records.

It is likely that the hackers have been scraping data from Linkedin for months, and even years. The company confirmed that its investigation has revealed that many of the stolen passwords were already expired or invalid, but there may be some valid ones too. The company said it is taking actions to protect its members from unauthorized usage of their accounts.

LinkedIn is not the only company to be affected. Earlier this month, a spokesperson for Tesla and SpaceX announced that the company had been hit by a large-scale data breach in 2013 that exposed the information of more than 50 million Tesla and SpaceX customers. The data included names, emails, phone numbers and physical addresses.

According to the New York Times , most of the stolen data was taken from a database at Target Corp., which was hacked in 2013. The hackers used credentials of a vendor to access the database, and then harvested the data at that time. The data went on sale recently, and was purchased by a company called ‘Grum.’

That is not all. Even before LinkedIn, LastPass – a popular password management service – was also hit by hackers where millions of accounts were compromised. The incident has since been called as probably largest password leak ever due to its size ( 4,668,133 unique email addresses), and distributed across file sharing sites like PasteBin and Mega.