LinkedIn Confirms Some Passwords Compromised

LinkedIn has confirmed earlier reports of a hack that compromised some member passwords.  Read on for details.

LinkedIn has confirmed that someone managed to compromise user passwords for some site members.  LinkedIn has disabled current passwords for impacted members and is contacting them to ensure that they reset passwords.  In addition, they are implementing more hardening measures to protect passwords in the future.  Here is the announcement:

An Update on LinkedIn Member Passwords Compromised

Vicente Silveira, June 6, 2012

We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:

• Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
• These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in these emails. For security reasons, you should never change your password on any website by following a link in an email.
• These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.

It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously. If you haven’t read it already it is worth checking out my earlier blog post today about updating your password and other account security best practices.

If you can’t log into the service, check your email to see if they disabled your password.  If so, follow the process to reset it.  Here’s hoping that LinkedIn’s countermeasures secure user data, and if there are any developments, we’ll bring them to you.