The lawsuit details several of LinkedIn’s automated tools that prevent data harvesting. Dubbed FUSE, Quicksand and Sentinel, these tools monitor the web traffic of LinkedIn users and limit how many other profiles a user can view, and how quickly a user can view those profiles. This tracking is intended to prevent scrapers from signing up for fake LinkedIn profiles and then vacuuming up vast amounts of data. The company also uses a tool called Org Block to block IP addresses it suspects of scraping and uses Member and Guest Request Scoring to track page requests.
After a day of speculation over whether the previously unknown “Shadow Brokers” could really be auctioning off an authentic stolen copy of the vaunted espionage group’s source code, WikiLeaks announced it would be releasing a free, “pristine” copy.
WikiLeaks — and The Shadow Brokers — claim to have copies of the code behind the Equation Group, labeled “one of the most sophisticated cyber attack groups in the world” when it was discovered last year. The operation went under the radar for 14 years before being discovered, well longer than other known attackers.