The database, on the other hand, has been released in a popular cybercrime forum, Breach Forums.
It is significant to note that USDoD is the same hacker who compromised the FBI's InfraGard security platform last year, revealing 87,000 members' personal information.
In a post on Breach Forums, the hacker verified that web scraping was used to access the most recent LinkedIn information. Web scraping is a software-driven, automated process that extracts data from websites, usually with the purpose of obtaining certain information from web pages.
As revealed by Hackread, the leaked data included publicly available information regarding the victims’ LinkedIn profiles, such as full names and profile bios. While this data also contains millions of email addresses, the hackers could not get hold of the passwords.
Email addresses from senior US government officials and organizations are exposed in the leak. Email addresses from other international government agencies have also been found.
Legitimacy of LinkedIn Data: Is it Authentic?
After analyzing more than 5 million accounts in the database, Troy Hunt of HaveIBeenPwned came to the conclusion that the data was a combination of information from other sources, including fraudulent email addresses and public LinkedIn profiles. Troy notes that the individuals, businesses, domain names, and a large number of email addresses are real, even though some of the information may be anecdotal or largely made up.
"Because the conclusion is that there’s a significant component of legitimate data in this corpus, I’ve loaded it into HIBP[…]But because there are also a significant number of fabricated email addresses in there, I’ve flagged it as a spam list which means the addresses won’t impact the scale of anyone’s paid subscription if they’re monitoring domains," Hunt explained.
This however was not the first time when the LinkedIn information was being leaked online by threat actors. A similar case happened back in April 2021, where 2 scrapped LinkedIn databases went on sale with 500 million and 827 million records. Also, in June 2021, a hacker sold a LinkedIn database that contained information about around 700 million users.