LinkedIn hacked, 6.5 million passwords stolen
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 at 6:46PM 
By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Professional social networking website LinkedIn was reported hacked today with over 6.5 million user passwords taken. All LinkedIn users should change their passwords as soon as possible.
Reports of a Russian hacker breaching the site's security, taking the passwords and putting them up. A report from The Verge states, "the user uploaded 6,458,020 hashed passwords, but no usernames. It's not clear if they managed to download the usernames, but it's likely that both have been downloaded.There is a possibility that this could be a hoax, but several people have said on Twitter that they found their real LinkedIn passwords as hashes on the list."
If you are a LinkedIn user and want to verify if your password has been compromised, this website is a good place to start.
For it's part, LinkedIn posted the following on its website.
We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:
- Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
- These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in this email. Once you follow this step and request password assistance, then you will receive an email from LinkedIn with a password reset link.
- These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.
It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously. If you haven’t read it already it is worth checking out my earlier blog post today about updating your password and other account security best practices.
