MyRecon OSINT
LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021)
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.
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.
What happened
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.
Who was behind it
No party has been publicly confirmed as responsible, and this page will not name one. Most breaches are never formally attributed: data surfaces on a forum or inside a combined dump long after the intrusion, and the trail back to a specific actor is rarely made public. Where a group has claimed responsibility it is usually named in the account above — that claim is theirs, not a finding of ours.
What was exposed, and why it matters
- Education levelsAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
- Email addressesThe address becomes a confirmed, active target — expect more phishing, better aimed.
- GendersSmall on its own; useful to anyone assembling a fuller profile.
- Geographic locationsWhere the account was used, which narrows a person down further than most people expect.
- Job titlesIdentifies who has access to what, which is how targets for business email compromise are picked.
- NamesTurns an anonymous address into an identified person, which is what makes targeted phishing possible.
- Social media profilesAdds detail to a profile that can be assembled from several breaches at once.
What to do if you were in it
- Expect better-aimed phishing. A message that already knows your name and where you have an account is the whole point of a breach like this.
Questions people ask about this breach
Was my email address in the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach?
Enter it in the box at the top of this page. MyRecon checks it against this breach and every other one on record, and the address is never stored.
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.