Hackers stole another 500 million profiles, this time from LinkedIn

CyberNews, an online security news site, discovered the privacy of 500 million Microsoft-owned LinkedIn users on the Web this week. A user of a popular Internet forum used by hackers is trying to sell them and is demanding at least a four-digit sum in US dollars. As proof that it actually has the data, it published a sample of the informations on the forum. The full names, e-mail addresses or telephone numbers of two million LinkedIn users are now available on the web. Users of the hacker forum can get to them for a small fee of about two dollars, according to the server. Its investigators confirmed that the published data came from LinkedIn. However, it is not yet clear whether all the data offered from half a billion accounts come from this social network. The server admits that it may also be aggregated data from other companies. Representatives of the social network itself responded to the report in a similar vein. "We examined the alleged database of data from LinkedIn, which was released for sale, and found that it was in fact an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies," said a statement released by LinkedIn on Thursday. The company insists that it has not lost any personal data. According to the company, the information published from the profiles on LinkedIn is freely available on the Internet anyway. However, CyberNews warns that published data can harm affected professional network users in many ways, such as phishing attacks or spamming of email addresses and phone numbers. According to the server, "particularly determined" attackers can use the information to manipulate people or even to steal identity.