LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) Data Breach

What happened?

During the first half of 2021, LinkedIn was targeted by attackers who scraped data from hundreds of millions of public profiles and later sold them online . Whilst the scraping did not constitute a data breach nor did it access any personal data not intended to be publicly accessible, the data was still monetised and later broadly circulated in hacking circles. The scraped data contains approximately 400M records with 125M unique email addresses, as well as names, geographic locations, genders and job titles. LinkedIn specifically addresses the incident in their post on An update on report of scraped data .

When did it happen?

The breach date in the public record is April 8, 2021. The record was added to the catalogue on October 2, 2021 and last updated there on November 7, 2023.

What information was reported as exposed?

• Education levels
• Email addresses
• Genders
• Geographic locations
• Job titles
• Names
• Social media profiles

These are incident-level categories. The record does not prove that every category was exposed for every affected person.

Who may be affected?

This record may be relevant to people who had an account or other relationship with LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) or used linkedin.com around April 8, 2021. A catalogue entry does not establish that every customer was affected or that every listed data category applied to each person. Compare the record with an official notice addressed to you.

What should you do?

Choose actions that match the information involved. If you find signs that someone is using your identity, the Federal Trade Commission provides a personal recovery plan at IdentityTheft.gov.