If you want to check if you are one of the five hundred million people whose LinkedIn data got leaked on the dark web. This article will show you how to quickly and easily find out if any of your account data was included in the latest 2021 LinkedIn data breach. By now everyone should have come to the conclusion that NOTHING is truly safe online, so start entering random data on your profiles to protect yourself moving forward.
Table of Contents
Related: How to enable or disable Reputation-based protection on Windows 10.
Although it's talked about as big news, it's no surprise to anyone that LinkedIn has failed to protect the personal account data of more than half a billion users. Earlier in the month, Facebook data breaches saw 500 million user accounts end up online, with Facebook simply shrugging their shoulders and moving on. Companies simply do not care about your data… Just like every other account you have online, there's absolutely no reason you shouldn't be entering made up data to form the basis of your online accounts. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Minds, YouTube, etc.
For example, you can leave most fields blank during the setup process of any online account and those that you can't, you can enter fake data…. It's super simple and prevents you from ever having to worry about your real data getting caught up in the next leak. Sadly if you haven't already done this with your account and desperately want to find out if your information has been leaked online there are a few different places you can check, however, only one is reputable enough to warrant using. So try to avoid the others if possible.
How do you check if you are one of the 500 million users whose LinkedIn data was leaked online?
In order to check if your LinkedIn account data has been leaked in this round of data breaches, as well as all those that have come before, you'll need to head on over to the https://haveibeenpwned.com/ website. Here you will need to enter the email address or phone number linked to your account (only US and Australian phone numbers work) however, an email address works just as well so don't stress if you don't have an AUS or US number.
Note: As well known as haveibeenpawned is in the data breach space, there's not much information on what is done with the data entered into the service. They may also be storing emails and phone numbers, so use the service with a grain of salt.
Once you have entered your phone number or email address just click the pwned? button and you'll get your answer in a few seconds.
Interestingly enough the email address I checked was linked to a data breach, however, I have never used the service…. So somewhere along the line, someone has signed up to the service using my email address… Probably just adding me to a mailing list…
After you get your answer, either good news or bad I would go ahead and change as much of the data linked to that account, email address and phone number as possible, you don't want to leave yourself open to identity theft or something similar down the track. It's also a good idea to generate some decent passwords as well. If you aren't using a password manager yet, I would strongly suggest using Bitwarden over LastPass now that LastPass has upgraded their terms of service.
haveibeenpawned has been around for a long time and allows you to check if your phone number and email address have been leaked from any service over the years. You don't have to specify which service you think may have been leaked.
