Millions of LinkedIn passwords have been stolen

Creaky

Creaky

Admin
Joined
Mar 20, 2010
Messages
3,488
Reaction score
16
If you have a LinkedIn account, you may want to change your password ASAP. ZDNet.com reports that over 6.4 million passwords from the business-themed social networking service have reportedly been stolen by a unnamed person or persons and posted on a Russian language forum.

According to the story, the passwords posted on the message boards were hashed. However, it also claims that over 300,000 of the weaker passwords have already been hacked. Other hackers have been brought in to try to discover the remaining passwords.

The Finland security firm CERT-FI also claims that this password dump could also include a list of LinkedIn user emails, although it appears they are still encrypted.

LinkedIn's Twitter page has been updated this morning with the message, "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more." The stock price for LinkedIn, which went public in 2011, has gone down today after these new reports came to light.

The ZDNet.com report points out that LinkedIn has a total of over 150 million users worldwide. So even if over 6 million passwords have been stolen from the company's servers, it would still affect less than 10 percent of its members.

Source: ZDNet
 
That's just great (that's sarcasm btw)

Nothing is safe these days. And the sad part is, all this does is give idiot governments more excuses to lock things down on us in the end.
 
That does sound pretty bad...and like Dexter said, all the more excuses for the governments to push more crap like SOPA or ACTA.

Guys like those Russians are ruining it for everybody else.
 
I really don't get what it is they think they can acomplish doing this sort of thing, all seems a bit pointless to me.
 
Creaky said:
I really don't get what it is they think they can acomplish doing this sort of thing, all seems a bit pointless to me.
Click to expand...

I think they're hoping to obtain some personal information, similar to the PSN attack of last year. Credit Card Numbers and whatnot for the sake of identity theft is my best guess.
 
NewDCD said:
I think they're hoping to obtain some personal information, similar to the PSN attack of last year. Credit Card Numbers and whatnot for the sake of identity theft is my best guess.
Click to expand...

If that's true, they just may get away with it. At least with PSN, credit card numbers were encrypted. WIth Linkedln, that may not be the case.
 
They could also blackmail LinkedIn with all this info, we know they need to take care of their stock prices... which are definitely going going any upper for the next weeks :P
 
Yeah...make no mistake. This little stunt was pulled with the objective of obtaining some sort of monetary gain.
 
I too read it in the news today but all the passwords are encrypted with SHA-1 and that's really difficult to crack unless you have a really basic password and according to what I read this was done via Phishing, capturing the passwords stored in cookies.
 
And today, another security breach, this time on the dating website, eHarmony. Yeowch. These guys don't let up.
 
I hope these people realize they aren't helping ANYONE by doing this. They aren't even helping themselves.

One of these days, when the entire net is pretty much under lock and key, remember, stuff like this made it easy for it to come to pass.
 
I've read that some of the accounts are being used already, changed my password so hopefully will be ok.

Also read that last.fm have been hacked today, seems to be a lot of this going on at the moment.
 
Creaky said:
I've read that some of the accounts are being used already, changed my password so hopefully will be ok.

Also read that last.fm have been hacked today, seems to be a lot of this going on at the moment.
Click to expand...

You know what's funny, while this is going on, corporations are constantly wondering why nobody trusts them in their online forms. It's like they don't realize that people can't have faith in security with hacking being so abundant.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top