CNN | 500 million LinkedIn users’ data is for sale on a hacker site

New York (CNN Business)Information scraped from around 500 million LinkedIn user profiles is part of a database posted for sale on a website popular with hackers, the company confirmed Thursday.

The sale of the data was first reported on Tuesday by cybersecurity news and research site CyberNews, which said that an archive including user IDs, names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, professional titles and links to other social media profiles was being auctioned off on the forum for a four-figure sum.

According to LinkedIn, the database for sale “is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.” The data from LinkedIn users includes only information that people listed publicly in their profiles, the professional social media site, which is owned by Microsoft (MSFT), said in a Thursday statement.  –read more—