MyRecon OSINTLinkedIn Scraped Data (2021)
Behind the exposed accounts
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 .
Follow the story
On 8 April 2021, LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) was breached. 125,698,496 accounts were exposed, including education levels, email addresses, genders. MyRecon rates it 64/100, severe. That is roughly everyone in Japan.
How the story unfolded
Open a step to read the detail. Missing dates stay unknown.
02Entry point
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 .
03Discovery and disclosure
A separate discovery or company-disclosure date is not established by this feed record.
04Added to the breach catalogue
2021-10-02. This is the catalogue date, not necessarily the disclosure date.
05Reported outcome
125,698,496 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people. The reported exposed data includes Education levels, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Social media profiles.
LinkedIn's position was that this was not a breach, and on the narrow question the company is right: nothing was accessed that was not already public on a profile, and no system failed. The record here says the same thing. It is also, for the person in the file, an entirely academic distinction.
The profile you made public was made public one reader at a time. That is a different thing from 125 million profiles compiled into a single file, sorted by employer and job title, and sold. Aggregation is the step that creates the capability, a recruiter reading your page is the intended use, a targeted phishing campaign against everyone with "finance" in their title at one company is what the compiled version enables.
This is the same argument that runs through the 2021 Facebook scrape and the Clearview AI case file. Public and harmless are not the same word, and scale is what separates them.
The story behind the breach
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 .
Breach description from Have I Been Pwned, used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
How did it happen?
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 .
What was the motive?
The published account does not establish the motive. We cannot tell what the attackers intended from the exposed data alone.
Reported demands or attempts to sell data describe what happened, rather than prove every attacker's intention.
What was the outcome?
125,698,496 accounts are listed in this breach. This is a count of accounts, not necessarily individual people.
The reported exposed data includes Education levels, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Social media profiles.
What was exposed, and why it matters
Education levels
Adds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
Email addresses
The address becomes a confirmed, active target, expect more phishing, better aimed.
Genders
Small on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
Geographic locations
Where the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
Job titles
Identifies who has access to what, which is how targets for business email compromise are picked.
Names
Turns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
Social media profiles
Adds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
What to do if you were in it
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach?
Use the email box on this page. The result applies only to this incident. If the provider does not cover this breach, we say so. A missing match does not prove you were unaffected.
What data was leaked in the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach?
education levels, email addresses, genders, geographic locations, job titles, names, social media profiles. Each one is explained above, along with what it means for the person it belongs to.
When did it happen, and when did it become public?
The breach is dated 8 April 2021. It was published to Have I Been Pwned on 2 October 2021, a gap of 178 days during which the data was already out.
Is the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach real?
Yes. Have I Been Pwned lists it as verified, meaning the data was checked against the source rather than taken on trust.
How many people were affected?
125,698,496 accounts. That is roughly everyone in Japan. That is accounts rather than people, one person often has several.
Read next
Also in the archive
Case Files: how the landmark breaches actually happened →
Three kinds of content appear on this page and they are kept apart deliberately. The breach description is quoted from Have I Been Pwned under its licence. The severity score, the field-by-field explanation and the advice are computed from the record itself, every sentence derives from a number or a flag in it, which is what stops the analysis drifting from the evidence. Anything under the "MyRecon's take" byline is editorial: our reading of this breach, presented as opinion rather than as a finding.