KimberMedia

“LeakedIn” Let’s You Know if Your LinkedIn Account Password Was Hacked

Posted by
in LinkedIn, Security, Social Media
June 14, 2012

Last week’s headlines were pretty scary. If you have a LinkedIn account, I’m sure your ears perked up when you heard the news:  A Russian hacker stole nearly 6.5 million encrypted LinkedIn account passwords.

Just to prove his point, he published those passwords online.

I didn’t take a chance. I changed my LinkedIn password last week.

Later I learned that the account names that go along with those passwords were not published. But that’s cold comfort for those on the receiving end of a reverse engineered attack on other accounts.

Other accounts? Yes. Like me, most people use some of their favorite passwords, regardless of their strength, on other accounts.

So…I changed my passwords on a hand-full of accounts last week; not just LinkedIn.

If you’re reading this, you should take a break and go change your LinkedIn password right now. (Since changing your LinkedIn password isn’t as easy as it sounds, check out this how-to.)

If you’re wondering whether your password was published, you can find out pretty easily at www.LeakedIn.com.

Just type in your password and the app will let you know if yours was published.

See my results. I was lucky.

But I especially like one piece of advice I see on the LeakedIn site:  Never use this password again.

Since I’m not a hacker I don’t think like this. But once your password is out there,  it’s certainly going to be used in other attacks. So don’t use it. Ever.

Ok. Go change your passwords.

 

Kevin is a blogger and account manager with KimberMedia. And he’s a no slouch with WordPress. So he’s in on our website maintenance projects, too. Kevin has a long history as a project manager. He schemes, then gets things done. He’s a small business owner, an association executive, a registered lobbyist, a yoga teacher, a biologist and a word nerd. He likes to sing in the choir at church, travel, and laugh a lot. Google