LinkedIn Sues Unknown Hackers in an Attempt to Find Out Who They Are

LinkedIn (LNKD) is facing a common plague of social networking companies: thousands of fake accounts used for spam and other nefariousness. So the company is using an increasingly familiar tactic: It’s suing those responsible for setting up the fake accounts, even though it doesn’t know who they are.Suspicious patterns of activity started on LinkedIn’s network last spring, according to a complaint filed Monday in federal district court in Northern California. Thousands of accounts were set up with automated tools, then used to gather information about actual people on the site. LinkedIn has tools in place to monitor accounts with suspiciously high levels of activity. Whoever was running the scheme was apparently aware of these limits, the complaint says, and designed the fake accounts to do just enough not to hit the thresholds.

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