I read about this on my LinkedIn feed then decided to search for "Wickr" there to see who else was talking about this. The search returned dozens of spam messages offering drugs in Asia and the US with information to contact on Wickr for price.
I reported these drug spam posts to LinkedIn - which is supposedly an anonymous report.
Next day I got a flood of reports on my own comments (nothing to do with that topic), so many I didn't bother to appeal as I had other things to do. Few hours later my account was down.
Seems that for retaliation the drug network decided to find me out and use their accounts to subvert LinkedIn's policy and ensure I can't stop their spam. They have new spam up now while my account is gone.
No good deed goes unpunished I guess.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc (Report an Issue)
Network directly with engineers where they spend time online. Not recruiters in purpose built HR portals.
Where would that be? I wouldn't recommend HN for networking purposes.
Spending time reporting issues and care-taking Microsoft is a waste of time.
Don't bother doing things for Microsoft that Microsoft is perfectly capable of doing itself. Nothing is stopping Microsoft from solving problems like this themselves. They don't give a shit.
If Microsoft had not acquired LinkedIn in 2016, it might still be led by people whose lives depended on the health and integrity of the site. Microsoft effectively poisoned Linkedin.
1. compromised in the spy movie sense of them voluntarily passing information to the scammers (potentially for money)
2. compromised in the IT security sense of their accounts or computers having been hacked
3. some superset of 1. and 2.
It’s not just in the movies.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/03/a-closer-look-at-the-lap...
> Microsoft says LAPSUS$ — which it boringly calls “DEV-0537” — mostly gains illicit access to targets via “social engineering.” This involves bribing or tricking employees at the target organization or at its myriad partners, such as customer support call centers and help desks.
> “Microsoft found instances where the group successfully gained access to target organizations through recruited employees (or employees of their suppliers or business partners),” Microsoft wrote.
Insider threat is still a significant concern to companies, and were one representing Microsoft one might want to at least take a peek at what happened and make sure nothing untoward is occurring.
Standard Disclaimers apply. I am not a Microsofty, nor do I play one on TV. Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
If you let other people see that you viewed their profile then LinkedIn will let you see who viewed your profile.
So yeah your theory seems most likely unless OP had Private Mode turned on for his profile (then they wouldn't be able to see that he saw their profile regardless of whether or not they have LinkedIn Pro).
Shortly after putting in for it, my linkedin reported I had a visit from a "Law Enforcement professional from the Washington-Baltimore area", which I thought was amusing.
This Linux journal article talks about how we are losing our freedom of expression and one of these areas are the war on hyperlinks: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/whats-our-next-fight
Support social networking sites that don't try to lock you into there ecosystem by making communication less free.
Not if the viewer has Private Mode on. Having Private Mode off for yourself is not sufficient to see who viewed your profile.
A colleague was leaving, and I'd been asked to go around the team of 200 people, gathering farewell greetings. Another work project at the same time was the software language translations for our product.
I manually trimmed the list of 200 colleagues down to 70 "international" names. Then I manually searched for each colleague on Google, and clicked the first link. Usually that was Facebook or LinkedIn.
I manually viewed 55 LinkedIn profiles over the course of 2 hours, and copy-pasted out only their "spoken language" field.
LinkedIn proceeded to block my account. "Your account has violated the LinkedIn User Agreement and Professional Community Policies. Due to the number and/or the severity of these violations, this account has been permanently restricted."
Politely explaining the situation to several customer service agents [Case: 211020-004202] didn't help. Had I been warned about viewing too many profiles too quickly, I'd certainly have slowed down! My actions weren't automated. I'd rather return to their online community and make this a learning experience, if possible.
Being unable to use LinkedIn may affect my future career prospects, but I feel powerless to change it at this stage.
It sounds insane, but I suspect what tripped their heuristic was not so much looking at a lot of profiles but not messsaging any of them within LinkedIn's messaging system, which is their use-case for making money (recruiter/journalist/hiring manager/etc.) So your browsing behavior appears to LI's heuristics either like a scraper or a legit user who isn't likely to convert into a paying customer, and they simply don't care which you are (whatever the TOS might allow).
I'm shocked LI's heuristics are that bad. I recommend you post your issue here (suitably anonymized) as a separate thread (link from here), and I expect it'll get upvoted.
(Ie just the messaging part)
Worse, it's shockingly difficult to convince the site admins of Reddit to decisively act on this sort of content, even though it's explicitly against their site-wide policies. I suppose this is probably the case for every site which hosts user submitted content and an upper management focused on easily produced metrics like "number of posts & comments per time unit".
Front line support is unlikely to be able to help you here. This doesn't seem like a particularly common occurrence. Here's how things typically go with weird cases like this:
1.) Support agent gets the case and says 'Uh, what do I do with this?' Escalation to team lead. 2.) Team lead reviews case and doesn't know what to do. Team lead escalates to manager. 4.) Manager reviews the case and tries to figure out the right team to send this to 5.) Manager sends it to a team. Team reviews the case. If it's the right team, they'll start investigating. 6.) If it's not the right team, the manager has to figure out another team that could be responsible for the case. 7.) Repeat 5&6 until the right team is identified
This all takes time. And assumes that the original customer support agent actually understands the issue for the security issue it is. Many frontline customer support agents are not particularly technical, so the agent may not even understand they have a security event on their hands.
Or, a PM who knows the right people to go to, offers help and things get quickly escalated.
If you were being snarky, it seems like this LinkedIn employee is trying to do the right thing. They probably don’t run support/there’s no reason to take cheap shots when they offer to help.
We shouldn't be punishing the gear on the cog that is helping turn the machine in the direction it needs to go.
I rely mostly on my my website for marketing and some twitter. I write articles in my field that focus on topics that are not well covered, but important. When I create relevant content, google picks it up.
It sounds like your field relies a lot on word of mouth, so maybe you can get your audience to talk about subjects that are important, by breaching topics that are a concern for your audience.
It's pretty interesting actually, on facebook you see people show off a manufactured persona that is always laughing, on vacation in exotic or glammy places, and on LinkedIn it's the exact same phenomena but the success indicators are different.
I'm still a bit clueless on the whole LinkedIn influencer thing though. Is there some monetary gain from that? I don't think they have the same possibilities for eg ad space or sponsorship as eg youtube or blog influencers, so perhaps it's more a personal vanity thing, or selling books and courses.
</rambling>
Some people seem to be advertising their coaching services (for example: by targeting people looking for jobs), some are trying to advertise themselves professionally (lots of people showing Microsoft/Oracle/AWS certificates and writing articles about it), some are trying to advertise themselves as industry leaders so they can advance internally in their company, some are trying to build a network they can recruit from, and some are just misguided and are trying to replicate what they see on other networks.
I guess that's why content is all over the place.
I think that people who are "active" on LinkedIn rank higher in searches & suggestions, so the feel-good shitposts might be a way to improve their "SEO" if they rely on LinkedIn to find leads (recruiters, etc).
Every day some one on my twitter timeline will retweet a "10x your biz on linkedin" - reading them makes me reconsider if intelligent life exists on this planet.
If you have a sufficiently popular CRUD, and you don't go our of your way to stop them, bad actors will leverage it to do crimes. It's that simple.
Though these could be honeypots or straight up scams
People shouldn't forget that they used to scrape your contacts from your email account through some sneaky user flow that got you to give them your email password.
Context: https://medium.com/@danrschlosser/linkedin-dark-patterns-3ae...
Like you, I'd thought I had a good run without it.
More recently, I noticed that some of the people who were way junior to me earlier in my career, are way ahead of me because they were strategically switching jobs every 1-2 years. After speaking to some of them, the common factor turned out to be LinkedIn, and I begrudgingly rejoined it in January.
People used to say I was nuts when I said LinkedIn outright make things up, that they try to track much more than they rightly ever should, and that they were doing nefarious things with the data they collect, but of course now we all know that was true. We don't even know the true extent of their fabrications.
Could LinkedIn be doing whatever it takes to make some extra money? It would neither be surprising nor unexpected in the least.
For example: scraping user address books and sending all their contacts LinkedIn spam without asking permission.
1 can be achieved by making it costly to break the rules. If new accounts have fees and privileges that accumulate over time (such as being able to post links, upload media, etc basically anything that is prone to abuse) then people will be less likely to break the rules since creating a new account will cost them money and time having to "level up" the new account before it can be useful again. This raises the cost of spamming dramatically and will often make it unprofitable.
Stack Exchange has a model of this where new accounts with little "reputation" can't do much and are heavily rate-limited & unable to post links/images and gaining reputation involves contributing to the community which makes spam significantly harder. The same "reputation" system is used to encourage people to moderate the community (in a way that requires input from multiple people & fully transparent, so misuse is hard and will be easily detected).
2 involves making money which means "growth & engagement" goes out the window and you need to charge for the service. Not being based on "growth & engagement" means you can also achieve 1 because you can now be selective with the kinds of people & content you accept.
> it's easy to get somebody on the inside to get to know the inner workings of the moderation process.
Knowing the process shouldn't be a problem. Ideally the process should already be public - aka the list of "rules" one should abide by when joining the community.
This is a non-problem that forums from back in the day managed to solve on a much lower (often zero) budget. It's only a problem when your business model is "growth & engagement".
I understand that selling drugs is illegal, but in that case the selling of drugs is what is illegal and not an image
I think after a social media network reaches X or XX number of million users, all users should have the right to appeal getting blocked / deleted / removed arbitration by an independent third party
PGP is the gold standard but the ease of use wins again.
1- https://github.com/WickrInc/wickr-crypto-c
2- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/10/wickr-amazons-encrypted-chat...
1. Either LinkedIn is hacked by drug mafia 2. Or drug mafia has people inside LinkedIn
But first thing - you should share you full report that you've sent to LinkedIn. You don't risk outing yourself - since mafia already knows your account.
People did it for years in CSGO. Reporting players for cheating through SteamAPI and Valve didn't even validate these reports, if the account who is reporting someone, was actually in the game together. Nope. Just reaching a certain number of reports was an automatic ban. 2 years or something without fix, funny times.
On my end, I had issues after I "looked up" someone convicted of a serious crime[1] who lived in my area code.
(I was looking into a different set of bad people. Apparently there's a lot of evil people on the internet. Not just the "dark web". They are everywhere, and abuse their access if they sense you're gunning for them in any sense of the word. The kids call reacting like some of did in real life "telling on yourself")
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdpa/pr/suburban-pittsburgh-man...
Also: whenever I read about LinkedIn, I can't help but think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-g7e31nAb8
Are you easily doxable ?
He'll be fine.
I keep a presence there to appease a friend but put as little information about myself as possible on the platform and strongly recommend other developers do the same.
I reported someone for spamming me with an insurance sells scam, within a few hours I'm informed this spam is just fine.
However, given your warning I'll refrain from reporting spam in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
My response was "I'm not on LinkedIn."
