While Facebook is busy trying to smooth over the fact that millions of user accounts were found on a hacker platform, the largest matter LinkedIn has to deal with is an increase in phishing scams on the professional social media platform.

Actually… as it turns out, LinkedIn might have more on its plate than originally thought, as information from 500 million accounts has been found wafting around the internet. The information comes by way of CyberNews, who spoke to an individual allegedly selling the data on hacker forums.

While this is doubtless a really big deal for the service, considering the severity of the situation, the platform’s response was that the data was not obtained via breach and that the information actually originates from a variety of sources.

LinkedIn, checked out

“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. 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’ve been able to review,” reads LinkedIn’s statement.

The exposed information includes full names, phone numbers and email addresses, among other more personal information.

The social media platform also stated that the discovered information was only pulled from public profiles. Users who had their profiles set to private were not affected. LinkedIn has yet to state whether it will be alerting affected the users whose information was included but at this point it’s too late anyway.

Data scraping doesn’t exactly violate any terms and conditions so users that have been affected… well, there’s not really much they can do about it.

Source: The Verge