LinkedIn has become an invaluable platform for professionals to build their networks, find job opportunities, and promote their skills and accomplishments. With over 800 million members, LinkedIn profiles contain a wealth of personal and professional information. This makes LinkedIn accounts an attractive target for hackers. There are several key reasons why hackers would want to break into a LinkedIn account.
Access Sensitive Corporate Information
For individuals who use LinkedIn for business purposes, their account likely contains sensitive information about their company, clients, projects, and more. Hackers can exploit this to gain insider knowledge and compromising material about organizations. By hacking an employee’s LinkedIn, criminals can stealthily uncover upcoming product launches, mergers and acquisitions, organizational charts, business strategies, and other confidential corporate data.
Hackers may be able to use this sensitive information for insider trading, blackmail, corporate espionage, or selling trade secrets. The professional insights and connections contained in LinkedIn make it a potential goldmine for cybercriminals seeking to infiltrate or exploit a company.
Spear Phishing Attacks
Access to someone’s LinkedIn account enables hackers to launch convincing spear phishing attacks against that person’s connections. Spear phishing is a personalized cyberattack aimed at specific individuals within an organization.
By studying the target’s LinkedIn connections, job role, and message history, the hacker can craft personalized emails that appear to come from a trusted connection. The tailored social engineering in these messages makes them more likely to bypass defenses and dupe recipients into handing over credentials or sensitive data.
Spear phishing via compromised LinkedIn accounts allows hackers to silently infiltrate the networks of major corporations, government agencies, or other high-value targets. The business relationships found on LinkedIn provide the perfect vehicle for targeted social engineering.
Spread Malware
In addition to personalized phishing scams, control over a LinkedIn account enables hackers to spread malware to an extensive professional network. Fake job postings and messages containing infected file attachments can be blasted out to thousands of connections.
By compromising a major company’s executive or salesperson’s LinkedIn, this malware distribution can infiltrate large organizations and consumer bases. The implicit trust in relationships between business connections makes LinkedIn an extremely effective platform for spreading malware at scale.
Access Other Online Accounts
Like many professionals, LinkedIn users often reuse the same passwords across multiple websites and online services. By obtaining someone’s LinkedIn login credentials, hackers may therefore be able to access a treasure trove of their other accounts.
Email services, banking portals, e-commerce sites, and even medical records could be hacked if users have reused their LinkedIn password. Hackers can also utilize password reset links sent to a compromised LinkedIn account to control associated online accounts. Accessing someone’s LinkedIn is often the first step in a full account takeover.
Ruin Reputations
For professionals and executives, their digital reputation is critical, and few platforms are as influential as LinkedIn for reputation in the business world. By hacking someone’s profile, hackers can damage their credibility and career prospects.
Fake posts, inappropriate messages, and account behavior violations under the identity of the victim can seriously impact their reputation. Hackers may also alter work history, skills, recommendations, and other profile details that could undermine the victim’s credibility and trustworthiness in their industry.
These reputation-harming actions could be used for revenge, extortion, or eliminating business competition. LinkedIn profiles are prime targets for those seeking to tarnish someone’s name and livelihood.
Steal Identity
LinkedIn contains a massive amount of personal data – full name, employers, job titles, birthdates, locations, and more. Identity thieves can leverage this information, combined with the professional insights on a profile, for highly targeted social engineering.
Government ID documents, banking information, or medical records could be attained by posing as the victim’s employer, colleague, or connection. Full identity theft enables criminals to open fraudulent accounts or file false tax returns to steal money.
Basic identity details on LinkedIn provide hackers with a powerful launchpad for commandeering someone’s entire public and financial identity.
Search for Job Opportunities
For individuals seeking employment, whether general job hunters or corporate recruiters and HR staff, LinkedIn is a critical portal for surfacing and evaluating job opportunities. Hackers looking for work can misuse access to LinkedIn accounts to search for open positions.
They may apply to premium job listings or contact recruiters using an assumed identity. Hacked LinkedIn accounts allow cybercriminals to obtain employment they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for using their own credentials.
This black hat job hunting can open doors to companies and roles that would enable hacking, cybercrime, intelligence gathering, or other illicit activities.
Impersonate Others
Access to someone’s LinkedIn profile provides hackers with an in-depth blueprint for assuming their identity. All the personal and professional details necessary to pass as the victim are available in one place.
Hackers can leverage this fraudulent impersonation to spread disinformation, make defamatory statements, misrepresent an organization, or engage in various forms of deception. The reputation-building nature of LinkedIn makes it the perfect mask for criminals to hide behind.
Impersonation scenarios may also involve attaching malware to copied LinkedIn profiles in an attempt to infect anyone who views or connects with the fake account.
Research Targets
LinkedIn is filled with sensitive insights and data points prized by hackers – networks of connections, familiar communication styles, project and work history, personal interests, and more. This makes it an unparalleled database for conducting reconnaissance.
By studying compromised accounts, cybercriminals can research everything from executives for ransomware attacks to influencers for social engineering scams. The depth of professional and personal intelligence on LinkedIn provides tremendous utility for hackers preparing spear phishing campaigns, deep fakes, corporate espionage, and other social engineering-based cybercrimes.
Thorough analysis of LinkedIn profiles allows hackers to build psychological models of targets and craft precisely tailored scams difficult for even security-savvy individuals to identify.
Access Saved Payment Methods
For premium account holders, LinkedIn allows saving payment information for purchases of services like job ads and enhanced profile visibility. By hacking the account, cybercriminals can access any saved credit cards, bank accounts, or other payment methods.
These can then be used to make fraudulent purchases within LinkedIn or other sites. In some cases, account billing addresses can even help hackers figure out a credit card’s security code not listed on the card itself.
LinkedIn’s premium features and recruitment services make saved payment data on compromised accounts a lucrative financial hacking target.
Scrap Connections Data
The massive trove of professional connections and contact details on LinkedIn is enormously valuable to hackers for sending phishing emails, compromising business networks, and assembling marketing lead lists.
Scraping tools can programmatically extract thousands of names, companies, titles, and email addresses from a target’s LinkedIn connections for malicious use. This data can then be cross-referenced with breached databases and sold on hacker forums.
The depth of connections data on LinkedIn is a key attraction for hackers seeking bulk exploitation of professional contact lists.
In summary, LinkedIn accounts contain a wealth of sensitive corporate data, personal details, business relationships, and identity signals highly coveted by cybercriminals. Hacking LinkedIn opens pathways to lucrative follow-on attacks like identity theft, spear phishing, malware distribution, financial fraud, and corporate espionage. For professionals, LinkedIn is a critical pillar of reputation and trust – making it an ideal target for threat actors seeking to manipulate online credibility and perceptions. Understanding why hackers prize LinkedIn access enables users to better secure their accounts and reduce the risks and impacts of potential compromise.