Codebreaker

Six million LinkedIn passwords leaked

John Moe Jun 6, 2012

Now there’s no telling what nefarious hacker will be able to help you network with people to get a job in sales. LinkedIn, the official social network of your dad, says it’s investigating claims of the leak and the authenticity of a big data dump on a Russian website. The hack is already being called the real thing, however, by Graham Cluley of the security firm Sophos.

He says:

“We’ve confirmed there are LinkedIn passwords in the data.
“We did this by searching through the data for (hashed) passwords that we at Sophos use only on LinkedIn. We found those passwords in the data. We also saw that hundreds of the passwords contain the word ‘Linkedin’.
“Our advice is to change your LinkedIn password. And if you use the same password on other accounts, change it there too.”

One wonders how bad a LinkedIn hack could be, probably nets more email addresses of contacts than anything else. Hope your spam filter can hold.
By the way, LinkedIn may not have been the only one hacked recently. Mitt Romney’s email may have been as well.

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