The contents of 500 million LinkedIn accounts is reportedly up for sale

The ubiquitous professional social platform LinkedIn is reportedly the subject of a new data theft involving the technique of scraping. The anonymous hacker that claims to be behind this wholesale attack has offered the files attained as a result at an auction. They now expect a 4-figure USD sum for the scraped data.

This incident apparently affects about half a billion users, 2 million of whom have had their data exposed as a preview of the contents of the planned sale. The perpetrator involved asserts that it was scraped directly from LinkedIn, although this company insists it has been aggregated from a number of other online sources instead.

Either way, this is just the latest in a string of privacy-related controversies involving the website. It has prompted an investigation into this company mounted by the Italian watchdog known as Garante. Its country's population has one of the highest LinkedIn subscriber counts in Europe, and has thus taken an interest in its data-security practices in order to assess the potential risk to those in its jurisdiction.

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