Man Behind LinkedIn Scraping Said He Grabbed 700 Million Profiles 'For Fun'

The man behind last month's scraping of LinkedIn data, which exposed the location, phone numbers, and inferred salaries of 700 million users, says that he did it 'for fun' -- though he is also selling the data. 9to5Mac reports: BBC News spoke with the man who took the data, under the name Tom Liner: 'How would you feel if all your information was catalogued by a hacker and put into a monster spreadsheet with millions of entries, to be sold online to the highest paying cyber-criminal? That's what a hacker calling himself Tom Liner did last month 'for fun' when he compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users from all over the world, which he is selling for around $5,000. In the case of Mr Liner, his latest exploit was announced at 08:57 BST in a post on a notorious hacking forum 'Hi, I have 700 million 2021 LinkedIn records,' he wrote. Included in the post was a link to a sample of a million records and an invite for other hackers to contact him privately and make him offers for his database.'

Liner says he was also behind the scraping of 533 million Facebook profiles back in April (you can check whether your data was grabbed): 'Tom told me he created the 700 million LinkedIn database using 'almost the exact same technique' that he used to create the Facebook list. He said: 'It took me several months to do. It was very complex. I had to hack the API of LinkedIn. If you do too many requests for user data in one time then the system will permanently ban you.''

Read more of this story at Slashdot.