You may have received, as I did, an email from LinkedIN over the past few days about a data breach that they experienced in 2012. It seems that the details of that hack are now available to be bought online and that the scale of the breach was bigger than reported.
At the time they said that password information of 6.5 million accounts had been compromised. It now turns out that it was actually doe over for email and password combinations totalling 117 million.
It’s by no means clear how much risk this exposes users to but it’s no bad idea to stop using that LinkedIN password that has been compromised. Yes, password security is a bore but it is important. Just imagine the chaos and hell having your eBay, Amazon or PayPal account taken over would hamper your business.
What’s frankly most annoying about the anodyne email from LinkedIn is that it offers no apology, is silent on the risks this hack means for individual subscribers and actually tries to pass the buck. We, as users, should be more diligent, it seems.
As they say in the email: “We recommend that you regularly change your LinkedIn password and if you use the same or similar passwords on other online services, we recommend you set new passwords on those accounts as well.”
One thing you might want to do is check if any of your online accounts have been affected. This site helps you check.
