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Breach exposure

Public breaches involving LinkedIn

Cross-matched against the WhatTerms breach catalog. Each entry links the breach disclosure, names the data classes confirmed exposed, and matches each class to a concrete recovery action — not just “your email was leaked”.

Recovery actions

Sorted by severity. Each action maps to one or more data classes confirmed exposed across the breaches below.

  • Treat SMS 2FA on this number as compromised. Move to TOTP or hardware keys; consider a relay number.

    High

    Phone numbers feed SIM-swap attacks and SMS phishing.

  • Switch this service to a per-service email alias and treat the leaked address as compromised.

    Medium

    Exposed emails feed phishing campaigns and credential-stuffing lists.

  • Audit accounts where you reuse this handle; assume it can be cross-correlated.

    Medium

    Handle reuse links pseudonymous accounts back to your real identity.

  • Warn high-value contacts that you may be impersonated; review who can DM/follow you.

    Medium

    Social graphs power impersonation and pretexting.

LinkedIn

Disclosed 2021-06-29 · 700.0M accounts

Public-facing profile data scraped at scale; included contact info beyond what users had marked public.

Data classes exposed

  • Email address
  • Username / handle
  • Phone number
  • Social graph (contacts/connections)

Source: Researcher disclosure; LinkedIn called it a scrape, not a breach. Read disclosure ↗