jimmyLi's blog

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...