jimmyLi's blog

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is warning employees that their personal details might have been compromised after a laptop was stolen from a staffer’s locked car. The stolen device contains records of personally identifiable information for numerous employees, contractors and “others.” The laptop is password protected, but because there’s no disk encryption system set in place, the chances for the information stored on it to be misused are fairly high. “The Administrator is extremely concerned about this incident and has directed that all IT security issues be given the highest priority. NASA is taking immediate steps to prevent future occurrences of PII data loss,” reads the notice sent by Richard J. Keegan Jr., associate deputy administrator, to employees. More at softpedia by @EduardKovacs  

LinkedIn yesterday confirmed that there was a breach of security, and that member passwords were dumped by the attackers. The password hashes have been posted on the Internet in a 250 Megabyte text file, and it is generally assumed that people have started to break the hashes to reveal the underlying passwords. All in all, about 6.5 million LinkedIn user accounts are affected by this. LinkedIn itself has taken counter measures to protect affected users accounts from being compromised. Probably the biggest protection in this regard is that affected account passwords have been invalidated, so that they can’t be used anymore to log in to LinkedIn. All affected members will receive an email from LinkedIn that contains instructions on how to reset the account passwords. LinkedIn notes that these emails will not contain links, to avoid copy cat emails that use this for phishing. It basically comes down to reseting the user account password to receive a new one. Affected mem...