Was your data in the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach?

LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) (linkedin.com) suffered a data breach in 2021 that exposed around 125,698,496 accounts. If you had an account, some of your personal data may be circulating in leaked databases. The fastest way to know is to check your own email — free, in about 30 seconds, no password required.

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 details sourced from Have I Been Pwned, the industry-standard breach database. Risk analysis by Nullivo.

What was exposed, and why it matters

Not all breaches carry the same risk — what matters is which fields leaked. Here is what the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach exposed and what each item actually enables:

Also listed in this breach: Education levels, Email addresses, Genders, Geographic locations, Job titles, Names, Social media profiles.

What to do if you were affected

These steps are ordered for this specific breach — the most urgent action given what leaked comes first.

1. Location data: Review location sharing on the accounts you still hold with this service.
2. Names and usernames: Search your usual username to see what else it exposes, and use distinct handles for sensitive accounts.
3. Email addresses: Treat any message referencing this service with suspicion, and never act on links in unexpected emails.
4. Check whether your own email appears in this breach — run a free scan to confirm before you spend time on the steps above.

How urgent is this now?

This data has been circulating for around 5 years, which means it has been copied, combined with other leaks and indexed by search tools many times over.

Remember: a breach can't be "un-leaked" — once a database is out, it exists in countless copies. The goal is to make the leaked data useless: change what can be changed, lock down what can't, and remove what has been republished.

Frequently asked questions

Breaches that exposed similar data

If the LinkedIn Scraped Data (2021) breach affected you, these breaches exposed comparable information — worth checking too, since leaked datasets are routinely combined.

• Was your data in the Mate1.com breach? (2016, ~27,393,015 accounts)
• Was your data in the Beautiful People breach? (2015, ~1,100,089 accounts)
• Was your data in the Wattpad breach? (2020, ~268,765,495 accounts)
• Was your data in the Zoosk (2020) breach? (2020, ~23,927,853 accounts)
• Was your data in the Apollo breach? (2018, ~125,929,660 accounts)
• Was your data in the Wishbone (2020) breach? (2020, ~9,705,172 accounts)

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