This could very well be related to the breach that occurred in May, but it might be a new one.
This morning a trap email account, known only to me and LinkedIn, started to receive a lot of spam of a similar nature. This hasn’t happened before. For anyone else to be aware of this addresses existence it had to be stolen from me or from LinkedIn, or possibly by monitoring an ISP if not encrypted en-route. I’m pretty confident that it wasn’t stolen from me; the system it exists on is pretty secure and under my nose. As an added measure, all addresses are stored with additional traps that aren’t known to a third party, and if none of these is used its reasonable to assume that the data wasn’t pinched from me.
Monitoring an ISP is possible, but I don’t think it’s likely.
This means the address was probably stolen from LinkedIn. It’s hard to know for sure whether this was in May or later, but there was no indication it had gone missing until this morning so it’s worth of more investigation.
Has anyone else suddenly started receiving spam on a linkedin-specific address?