Linkedin Confirms being HACKED

1.    Most of us who surf web regularly do have our identities associated with popular social networking sites...like gmail...orkut...facebook and linkedin etc.So the latest news is that if u have a profile on LInkedin....please change ur password.....the news in brief goes like this....

2.     LinkedIn has confirmed on 6th Jun 12 that at least some passwords have been compromised in a major security breach correspond to LinkedIn accounts. First reported by Norweigan IT website Dagens IT the breach that about 6.5 million encrypted passwords were posted on a Russian hacker site.Thus those most of the users with compromised passwords noticed that their LinkedIn account password are no longer valid.The file uploaded only contains passwords hashed using the SHA-1 algorithm and does not include user names or any other data. However, the breach is so serious that security professionals advise people to change their LinkedIn passwords immediately. An SHA-1 hash is an algorithm that converts your password into a unique set of numbers and letters. If your password is “test_123,” for example, the SHA-1 hex output should always be “ab7a614854d2ef5ee9d9cc30e6f2bdcd19fe49ea.” As we can see that is problematic since if we know the password is hashed with SHA-1, we can quickly uncover some of the more basic passwords that people commonly use.

3.     The most common password used was “123456,” followed by “12345″ and “123456789.” All in all, more than half a million people chose passwords composed of only consecutive numbers. So, if a hacker tried to log in to all RockYou accounts with just one password attempt–123456–every hundred or so attempts would yield a compromised account. Dozens of attempts can be scripted every second, so Imperva estimates that using this technique would only take around 15 minutes to hack 1,000 accounts.

4.    Another site offers you to know if ur linkedin username was actually amongs the hacked lot or not.Not sure about how genuine it is...it is available at

http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/07/was-your-linkedin-password-hacked-heres-how-to-find-out/

5.    Thanks http://thehackernews.com/2012/06/linkedin-confirms-millions-of-account.html