LinkedIn Data Found in Unsecured Databases

A security researcher identified eight unsecured databases that held "approximately 60 million records of LinkedIn user information." GDI Foundation, where the security researcher is from, is a nonprofit organization with a mission to "defend the free and open Internet by trying to make it safer." The researcher, Sanyam Jain, contacted Bleeding Computer when he noticed "something strange." He was seeing unsecured databases containing the LinkedIn data "appearing and disappearing from the Internet under different IP addresses." While the majority of the LinkedIn data was reportedly public, some of the data contained email addresses. "According to my analysis the data has been removed every day and loaded on another IP. After some time the database becomes either inaccessible or I can no longer connect to the particular IP, which makes me think it was secured. It is very strange," Jain told Bleeding Computer. The total size of all of the databases was 229 GB, with each database ranging between 25 GB to 32 GB.