LinkedIn security was compromised four years ago and initially it was reported that 6.5 million passwords are leaked but actually turned out to compromisation of 117 million passwords.
On Wednesday, the professional social network company acknowledged that a massive batch of login credentials is being sold on the black market by hackers.
The worst part about it is that, because people tend to reuse their passwords, hackers are more likely to gain access to 117 million people’s email and bank accounts.
The advice for everyone who uses LinkedIn at this point is: Change your password and add something called two-factor authentication, which requires a text message every time you sign in from a new computer.
Because of the company’s old security policy, these passwords are easy for hackers to crack in a matter of days.
Companies normally protect their customer’s data with encryption and sometimes multi-layer encryption but at the time, LinkedIn was compromised back in 2012 when the company hadn’t added a pivotal layer of security which makes the jumbled text harder to decode.
LinkedIn is now scrambling to try to stop users from sharing stolen goods online, a very difficult task, and the company is invalidating all customers passwords which are not changed since they were compromised.
"LinkedIn said it’s reaching out to individual members affected by the breach. This particular hack affects a quarter of the company’s 433 million members." reported by CNNSecurity experts are wondering what took LinkedIn to figureout what actually happened or to share the information with public
“If LinkedIn is only now discovering the scale of data that was exfiltrated from their systems, what went wrong with the forensic analysis that should have discovered this?” said Brad Taylor, CEO of cybersecurity firm Proficio.Hackers are selling the stolen LinkedIn database on a black market online called "The Real Deal"
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