White-collar workers beware, it looks like the workplace-networking site LinkedIn has been hacked.
Approximately 6.5 million unique password hashes have been stolen and leaked. This means potentially 100 million users have had their data compromised (largest estimate used to describe severity).
Please log-in to your LinkedIn account ASAP and change your password!
If any of your other log-ins used the same password, change those too!
Strangely, the designers of the LinkedIn site did not fully (potentially at all, but I don’t know that) encrypt their data prior to database upload. A simple preventive measure would have been to salt the data; however this was not done by LinkedIn. Salting would extend the password hash by multiple digits, thereby indefinitely extending the time and effort needed by dictionary trolling software to crack the hash.
Feel free to verify this at Bing.com.
At this point TW doesn’t feel confident in pointing you to a website that could verify if your password info was stolen.
Any of the technical information listed above may be slightly off, please let us know if we used a term incorrectly. We aren’t hackers 🙂
