The account data of 500 million users of the social networking website LinkedIn is for sale on a hacker`s website. This goes to show that you cannot trust any website with your details if they have poor OPSEC. You are better off networking by meeting with others at trade shows and exhibitions. There you may meet others and share details to make others aware of you. Using a social networking website that has poor security and allows something like this to happen. How did this even happen anyway? Was it a faulty API that allowed scraping data as with the Facebook leak? Or was it just a good old hacking attack? But the actual site with the data is conveniently left out of the articles. Where is it? I cannot find this at all. But apparently, you can use Rest API to scrape the user data, so this might be possible by scraping publically accessible user data. A URL like this will work to get basic data: url : https://api.linkedin.com/v1/people/~?format=json, then additional API permissions to get even more data. But I hope there are limits on this, otherwise, a person could just scrape all user data in one go. Putting limits on the scraping of data would be a very good idea.
It does require extra permissions on the API to get extra data from the website, so this might only be publically accessible user profile data. Still, this is not a good thing.
This is what the leak looks like.
