LinkedIn has filled one lawsuit in order to identify the unidentified hackers who created several thousand fake accounts with the aim of scraping the profile data. As per the court documents, those defendants operated automated bots on the virtual computers which were rented from Amazon in order to harvest the details on social networking site for the professionals.
The lawyers for LinkedIn claimed that it cost $5000 to deal with those hackers-they filed one complaint with the Northern District of California Court after discovering the fake accounts.
In the court submission, LinkedIn said that Since May 2013, some unknown entities or persons employing several automated software programs or bots have registered several thousand fake LinkedIn member accounts and therefore they have copied or extracted data from the profile pages of numerous members.
This practice is popularly known as data scraping and it is explicitly barred by the user agreement of LinkedIn that prohibits the access to LinkedIn through spidering, scraping, crawling or by using any other data or technology to access the data without any express written consent of the LinkedIn members or LinkedIn.
Although, till now the identity of the hackers is unknown, as the hackers had used the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud it, but they are expecting that they would be able to identify those Doe Defendants by serving the third-party discovery on AWS.
While this thing was not clear what these hackers would do with these data, LinkedIn mentioned that irreparable and ongoing harm had caused. As per the complaint of LinkedIn, having several thousands of false profiles decreases the integrity and the accuracy of information on this website, causing possibly the legitimate users to become misled or confused.
LinkedIn said that the mission of this site is to connect the professionals of this world to make them more successful and productive. Therefore this company hosted the CVs of around 259 million members and a number of them are high-level executives.
Recruiters of the 90 of the Fortune 100 companies utilize the website to look for the prospective candidates.
Mike Small-the security analyst at Kuppinger Cole mentioned that the cloud services are quite cheap to build up, very powerful and quite easy to use. They mainly need one credit card to get the access. These features are quite attractive to the cyber criminals and hackers like as to the legitimate users.
The cloud services mainly have some extensive control in the place in order to prevent the use for the illegal or the illegitimate purposes and the cloud service that deals normally, forbid this particularly. The cyber criminals would require searching the way to cloak the identity while utilizing the public cloud service in this way.
This incident demonstrates all the difficulties faced in the world where both law and the law enforcement is organized geographically but the criminal activities that use the Internet cut across the boundaries.
LinkedIn spokesman, Mr. Richard George uttered that they are a members-first organization and they feel that they have the responsibility to protect that control that their members have more than the information that they use on LinkedIn.
by shailhacking.com
- See more at: http://hackersnewsbulletin.com/2014/01/linkedin-files-lawsuit-unmask-anonymous-hackers.html#sthash.7G6jQc4O.dpuf
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