After taking note in June 2022 that the company had seen “an increase in fraudulent activity” on your platform and across the web, LinkedIn efforts announced in October to detect and remove more fake accounts, expand verification, and generally “increase the authenticity” of your 900+ million users. Today’s announcements dramatically expand the scale and reach of those verification initiatives.
Being able to verify components of your identity and employment will not prevent attackers from spawning fictitious personas and even fake companies to “verify” fake jobs. But if job verification is widely adopted on LinkedIn, it will make it harder for bad actors to impersonate legitimate accounts and create convincing fake personas.
“Simply by seeking Verification, members and organizations can be more confident that the people they collaborate with are genuine and that the job affiliations in their profiles are accurate,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post posted today.
The rollout of the three verification options appears to be starting in the US. Rodriguez wrote in the blog post that not all LinkedIn users around the world will have access to the verification methods immediately. “We will expand the availability and ways you can participate over time,” he wrote.
Microsoft notes that its verified ID tools are based on open standards, which the company says will make it easier for LinkedIn’s system to interoperate with existing employee management or HR systems. Microsoft has been investing and development of decentralized identity schemes for some years. Bringing the technology to nearly a billion LinkedIn users will be a big step toward broader adoption.
“On LinkedIn, members will see an option to verify their workplace on their profile,” Microsoft wrote in its blog post. “With a few taps on their phone, members can get their digital employee ID from their organization and choose to share it on LinkedIn.”
Researchers who monitor digital crime say that strong verification methods can actually reduce the prevalence of online scams, or at least make it harder for attackers to do so on a consistent basis. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk last year, for example, Twitter has been criticized for transitioning its verification model to a service that anyone with a credit card can pay for.
“A lot of actors are going to do a LinkedIn profile pretending, say, I’m from WIRED and I’m a director. They can arbitrarily put whatever they want,” says Ronnie Tokazowski, principal threat advisor at cybersecurity firm Cofense. “There are cases where scammers contact victims via LinkedIn and start a conversation about investment scams or to distribute fake job ads. Fraud cases definitely happen through LinkedIn.”
While the professional social network is far from the only platform where criminals and nationally backed actors rush, LinkedIn still retains a particular air of legitimacy and a sense that a professional social network is benign and mundane. Therefore, it can be a platform where providing options for information verification is particularly urgent.