Security researchers find a new way scammers can abuse job posts on LinkedIn

Technology and the internet has seen quite the growth in the last few years, within this time period a large global population has gotten onto the internet. This large growth has given shape to a new industry that in these years have topped the list of leading industries. Alongside the internet countless internet companies have also grown to be tech giants that have developed products and services that make our lives better and easier.

While technology and the internet sure does make our lives easier, it also has a significant disadvantage and that is scams. With the internet, scams have become largely digital since scamming online safeguards the scammers identity while also limiting the chances of them being caught. Financial scams are on the rise, while these numbers continue to increase on the internet. Apart from carrying out several financial scams, these scammers also trick people into revealing their personal information such as address, phone number or even their resume.

A lot of these scams usually takes place on social media, where scammers easily find a way to hide their identity and target people. With social networks having a large traffic, it's easier for scammers to find a potential target on them. One such example is that of the world's largest social/job site for professionals 'LinkedIn’ on which a recent scam has started to pop up. This scam basically is the posting of fake jobs under any company’s name thus convincing a large amount of people into sending their CV’s and resume to the scammer.

While posting fake jobs on LinkedIn is not a new thing, this technique to do it is potentially more dangerous since it allows for scammers to post the job under a company’s name moreover if the company locates the job posting and tries to remove the post, it won’t be able to do so.

This technique was just recently found out by ‘Harman Singh’ who’s a security expert at ‘Cyphere’ and first reported by BleepingComputer, he found out that through his particular technique, one could use any account that has no connection with a company’s website and list a fake job advert under the company’s name through it. The job post will then not reveal who posted it but will only show itself under the company’s name, moreover the applied resumes on the post are mailed to the account that posted the job rather than the company’s email account. The company with no option to remove the job post will be left with no option but to contact LinkedIn support for it.

While the technique is still new and is not quite popular on the platform, if not solved can lead to bigger problems for the platform. A LinkedIn representative while indicating towards this problem said that they are developing more tools for improving detection on the platform and will also bring company email verification to the platform.

Photo: DeFodi Images via Getty Images

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