LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit against unknown parties for a hacking job that involved thousands of automated accounts collecting real information.

Officials began noticing strange activity patterns on the social networking site last spring, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

LinkedIn filed a complaint Monday in federal district court in Northern California, saying that thousands of fake accounts were set up with automated tools to garner data about real people using the site.

The operators running the bots were wise enough to stop just short of safety thresholds LinkedIn has in place to monitor account activity.

According to LinkedIn's complaint, the false accounts not only violate LinkedIn agreements, but also break state and federal computer security laws as well as federal copyright law.

While plenty of companies have sued hackers, LinkedIn's case is unusual in that the site isn't sure exactly who is being sued. But even without knowing who did the hacking job, LinkedIn is making a wise move with the lawsuit, which will give the case more weight, according to Businessweek's report.

"Filing the lawsuit allows you to issue enforceable subpoenas to third parties," Al Saikali, co-chair of the data privacy and data security practice at law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon, told Businessweek.

"Otherwise you're simply sending a letter to the in-house lawyer at the service provider, who will usually either ignore it or file it in the trash can because it has no legal weight, and most service providers try to protect their users' anonymity."

The court case is an initial step, although the lawsuit may not unearth the hackers behind the job.

If the accused are sophisticated in any shape or form, it may not help at all," Chester Wisniewski of security firm Sophos, told Businessweek.

Even if the "John Doe" defendants are never identified, LinkedIn could win the case anyway.

According to Saikali, the lawsuit could be LinkedIn's way of trying to scare future bot operators from attempting a similar scheme.

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