I was hanging out in the Slack #industrynews channel with some of the engineers and data scientists here at INKY, when one of them shared this:
LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes data of 92% of users, including inferred salaries
His immediate reaction: “/ here we go guys ... it’s our Super Bowl time, ha".
The headline was "LinkedIn breach reportedly exposes data of 92% of users, including inferred salaries."
That’s seven hundred million business profiles.
The 9to5Mac reporter, Ben Lovejoy, doesn’t waste much of your time. He lays out what categories of information were obtained, notes the small comfort that passwords weren’t breached, but warns of how valuable these profiles are to identity thieves and phishers, who can make their impersonations more convincing.
“wow,” says another engineer.
“Perfect trove for phishers,” says the boss. "It's 92% because they don't know yet that the remaining 8% were already compromised. Now they have the social graph for the entire working world.”
“might need to study the data.... lol,” the first guy muses.
Someone speculates, “So they sell those data dumps ... anyone know how much they charge for detailed info on 700m LinkedIn users? I know I was also surprised at how low some of the data breaches go for.”
The discussion then devolves into an exchange about where to obtain prices for such material. I imagine if you buy in bulk, you can get a pretty good deal, maybe a few pennies apiece. But given the value, I’m sure the phishers are lining up to buy into this bonanza.
It’s going to get a lot busier around here at INKY. We've got the best focused anti-phishing solution on the market. The product is mature, battle-tested, and works. It can be scaled quickly and easily. And it runs on any system, platform, software, or email client. People being attacked by skilled phishers need even more skilled phishing defense. Demo INKY today!