Almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords have been hacked, a user in Russia claimed. The website, which has as many as 150 million users, is investigating the reports.
The social networking site has not yet officially released a statement but tweeted: “Our team is currently looking into reports.”
Some Twitter users reported that they’ve found their hashed LinkedIn passwords on the list, security expert Per Thorsheim said.
LinkedIn said in its latest tweet that “Our team continues to investigate but at this time, we are still unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred. Stay tuned here.”
LinkedIn revealed through its own tweet that it’s looking into reports of stolen passwords, and it advised users to stay tuned for more information.
BBC quoted security researcher Graham Cluley as saying that he believed the breach was genuine.
“We’ve confirmed there are LinkedIn passwords in the data.
“We did this by searching through the data for (hashed) passwords that we at Sophos use only on LinkedIn. We found those passwords in the data. We also saw that hundreds of the passwords contain the word ‘Linkedin’.
“Our advice is to change your LinkedIn password. And if you use the same password on other accounts, change it there too.”
LinkedIn passwords are encrypted using an algorithm known as SHA-1, which is considered very secure. Complex passwords will likely take some time to decrypt, but simple ones may be at risk.
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