LinkedIn company filed a complaint in San Francisco against unknown hackers responsible for the creation of an impressive amount of fake profiles

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is considered the social network of professionals, its scope is to give the possibility to the users to build their network of business relationship, sharing content of interest and exchanging opinion and suggestion in dedicated discussions.

But LinkedIn represents for hackers and cyber spies an amazing source of information that could be gathered and exploited to conduct cyber attacks like a spear phishing offensive against a group of person sharing similar characteristics (e.g. Employees of the same companies, participant to organization or projects), habits or attitude.

Recently, numerous professionals have focused their interest in the study of these complex networks designing advanced tools able to mine an impressive amount of information on a target profile, one of the most interesting research produced the tool known as FBStalker, a tool created to find a comprehensive amount of data on any Facebook user.

On the other side cybercrime is using automated software to conduct illegal activities on the principal social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, it has been observed by security expert an increment of scraping practice.

The term scraping refers the practice of extracting information from a web application or a web site, in this case of social networks with the intent to create thousands of fake member accounts copying data from member profile pages.