Random testing of the profile photos shows they resemble but do not match other photos posted online. It remains unclear why LinkedIn has been flooded with so many fake profiles lately, or how the phony profile photos are sourced. Lathrop said he’s still not sure how they’re going to handle getting new employees allowed into their company on LinkedIn going forward. Not long after that, the phony profiles that were not on the company’s list were deleted from LinkedIn. Lathrop said that after his company’s third complaint, a LinkedIn representative responded by asking ISOutsource to send a spreadsheet listing every legitimate employee in the company, and their corresponding profile links. But like heck they don’t! These people don’t exist, and they’re claiming they work for us!” “When we complained to LinkedIn, they’d tell us these profiles didn’t violate their community guidelines. “Then I noticed that they all claim to work for us at some random title within the organization,” Lathrop said in an interview with KrebsOnSecurity. Lathrop said that about two months ago his employer noticed waves of new followers, and identified more than 3,000 followers that all shared various elements, such as profile photos or text descriptions. That is, if affected users complain loudly enough (posting about it publicly on LinkedIn seems to help). Like Miller, Lathrop’s experience in fighting bot profiles on LinkedIn suggests the social networking giant will eventually respond to complaints about inauthentic accounts. Jason Lathrop is vice president of technology and operations at ISOutsource, a Seattle-based consulting firm with roughly 100 employees.
“I said, ‘You guys should be doing something on the backend to block this.”
“I wrote our LinkedIn rep and said we were considering closing the group down the bots were so bad,” Miller said. Miller said that after months of complaining and sharing fake profile information with LinkedIn, the social media network appeared to do something which caused the volume of group membership requests from phony accounts to drop precipitously. Miller said these profiles are all listed in the order they appeared. Some of the bot profiles identified by Mark Miller that were seeking access to his DevOps LinkedIn group. Prior to that we did not get the swarms of fakes that we now experience.” “It’s hit like hell since about January of this year. “We receive over 500 fake profile requests to join on a weekly basis,” Taylor said. Together with the group’s co-owner, Taylor said they’ve blocked more than 12,700 suspected fake profiles so far this year, including dozens of recent accounts that Taylor describes as “cynical attempts to exploit Humanitarian Relief and Crisis Relief experts.” Hamish Taylor runs the Sustainability Professionals group on LinkedIn, which has more than 300,000 members. Since then, the response from LinkedIn users and readers has made clear that these phony profiles are showing up en masse for virtually all executive roles - but particularly for jobs and industries that are adjacent to recent global events and news trends. Last week, KrebsOnSecurity examined a flood of inauthentic LinkedIn profiles all claiming Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) roles at various Fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Hewlett Packard. Some of the fake profiles flagged by the co-administrator of a popular sustainability group on LinkedIn.
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