F-Secure: Data of 200k Finnish LinkedIn users posted on hacker forum

LinkedIn has strongly denied claims about the leak, a cybersecurity news site reports.

The records of around 200,000 Finland-based LinkedIn users have been leaked on a hacking forum, according to Finnish security firm F-Secure, advising its customers to be vigilant.

However, LinkedIn has vehemently denied that any private member data had been leaked, according to a report by cybernews.com (siirryt toiseen palveluun) on Friday.

F-Secure issued the warning via Twitter on Thursday.

"Over 200k records of Finnish LinkedIn users has (sic) been leaked on a hacking forum. The data contains names, phone numbers, email addresses and more," F-Secure's tweet read.

"We've alerted our customers. The data could be used in spear phishing campaigns, so stay vigilant!" the firm's tweet continued.

Spear phishing is a technique used by cybercriminals to access a person's stolen personal data like email addresses, names and phone numbers in order to falsely use their identity, often for monetary gain.

It remains unclear whether the data of Finland-based LinkedIn users is at risk.

More broadly, cybernews pointed to its earlier reporting (siirryt toiseen palveluun) that said an archive containing data "purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put up for sale on a popular hacker forum," while two million other records were leaked as "a proof-of-concept sample by the post author."

Web scraping, or web data extraction, is the automated collection of data from different websites, and is often sold to others.

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