The popular business-related social platform LinkedIn is facing a bit of an identity crisis. Many legitimate businesses use the platform for sourcing and hiring experts; however, recent waves of fake impersonators are making it extremely difficult.
There has been a significant rise in fake profiles using fabricated identities that have been lifted from legitimate accounts and feature AI-generated profile pictures. These accounts look very real, causing a major headache for corporate HR departments or those that manage invite-only LinkedIn groups.
Last week, KrebsOnSecurity investigated and revealed a flood of inauthentic accounts, all posing as Chief Information Security Officers for big fortune 500 companies, including Biogen, Chevron, Hewlett Packard, and others. Since this announcement, many other users have reported similar cases, and it seems these fake profiles are showing up en masse in executive roles across many different industries.
Hamish Talor runs the Sustainability Professionals group on LinkedIn and has added his voice to the concerns about these fake profiles. Since the start of the year, Taylor has announced that they’ve had to block more than 12 700 accounts suspected of being fake. He goes on to say that they receive approximately 500 fake requests to join each week, and it’s gotten much worse since January this year.
Another prominent LinkedIn user, Mark Miller, who owns and runs the DevOps Group, has also noticed a similar increase. Miller reported that he deals with fake profiles daily, sometimes hundreds of them. Miller has reported these accounts to LinkedIn reps for months to no avail. Finally, after eventually threatening to close his group because of the sheer number of fake profiles, it appeared that some action was taken.
Because of these and many other similar issues, platform users are begging for better tools and more protection against these fake profiles. After the recent LinkedIn phishing attacks experienced, we’re eager to see what they do to help businesses and groups deal with these waves of fake profiles.
