We, as a 21st century generation, take great pride in all what we have achieved in technological sphere. Today, there are tools to cater our every need. From ordering food online to carrying out our business activities, this man-made digital realm does everything. Such has been the excellence of it that we now pretty much rely on it to complete the most basic of tasks. While it’s more seamless, the dangers of it are finally popping up to the surface. With online activities being more important than ever before in this phase of a global pandemic, everything has become somewhat one dimensional. The options at your disposal for completing a particular task are too few, and cybercriminals are well aware of it. The pandemic has basically narrowed down their point of focus for them, and the result of it has been a cyber destruction that is giving no impressions of slowing down at all. Along with core businesses across different industries, government structures have been on the wrong end of these attacks as well. The list of victims is growing at a breakneck pace and the latest one down is the popular job-hunting platform, LinkedIn. A team of analysts from Privacy Sharks came across a trove of data that claimed to have 700 million records of users available in the cache. It was listed on 22nd June on a hackers’ underground forum RaidForums by someone with a username of “GOD User TomLiner”. The hacker even provided 1 million records as a proof of authenticity. This is a second LinkedIn-related data leak in 2021. The first one came earlier this year in April when over 500 million records were leaked.
Nevertheless, there is a similar pattern in these two attacks. As per the company, no breach of their systems was observed on the occasions. Hence, this data could have been sourced from an assortment of websites and public profiles. Privacy Sharks reported that data like full names, gender, phone numbers, email addresses and other relevant industry information was included in the records. The security consequences of it are supposed to be very serious. Privacy Sharks analysis asserted that:
“With details such as email addresses and phone numbers made available to buyers online, LinkedIn individuals could become the target of spam campaigns, or worse still, victims of identity theft.”