LinkedIn breach – Fraud.org

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LinkedIn, the professional social networking site, has announced that the 2012 breach that compromised 6.5 million login credentials is now much more extensive than they originally believed. The breached information is now known to include information on 167 million LinkedIn accounts, 117 million of which contain both the emails and the passwords of users. It is not clear whether the 167 million LinkedIn accounts include or are in addition to the original 6.5 million login credentials that were compromised by the same hack in 2012.

Announced: May 18, 2016

Description of breach: LinkedIn released a statement to its members on May 18, confirming the breach was larger than they originally believed and detailing the security procedures the website will undergo: “Yesterday, we became aware of an additional set of data that had just been released that claims to be email and hashed password combinations of more than 100 million LinkedIn members from that same theft in 2012. We are taking immediate steps to invalidate the passwords of the accounts impacted, and we will contact those members to reset their passwords. We have no indication that this is as a result of a new security breach.”

Data breach period: 2012

Official info from LinkedIn: https://blog.linkedin.com/2016/05/18/protecting-our-members

Contact LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask

More coverage of this breach: Fortune, Motherboard, and PCWorld