LINKEDIN HAS NOW disabled all the passwords that were accessed by a hacker last week and contacted the users affected, the social network said.
The company said to its knowledge no accounts had been breached after the leak. In a blog post on its website, LinkedIn said that the passwords were leaked alone without their corresponding email logins.
A criminal investigation is now under way after a Russian hacker posted on an online forum on Wednesday claiming to have stolen almost 6.5million passwords in “hashed” form. (See our explainer for a guide to password jargon.) The company said:
We take this criminal activity very seriously so we are working closely with the FBI as they aggressively pursue the perpetrators of this crime.
LinkedIn has pledged to introduce “additional enhancements” to its security, which already includes both ‘hashing’ and ‘salting’ of passwords.
It said that all passwords leaked in the security breach had been disabled by the end of Thursday, the day after news of the hack emerged.
Other sites also suffered security problems last week. Dating site eHarmony confirmed that a “small fraction” of its users’ passwords had been compromised, while music streaming site Last.fm urged users to change their passwords over a suspected security issue.
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