Change your LinkedIn password immediately

Reportedly around 6.5 million LinkedIn password hashes were leaked and posted on a Russian web site. LinkedIn has confirmed that some of the passwords were compromised and their security team is still investigating the root cause. Although the password hashes file do not include the corresponding email address, the hacker who stole the password hashes might have stolen the corresponding email ID as well.

If your password on LinkedIn was compromised, hacker could be possible to access your private information and send direct messages to your contacts or post any information on the related social networks. We strongly recommend LinkedIn user to change their password immediately. If you are using the same ID (email address) and password on other social networking web sites, it is time to change them and use different new passwords for each one.

Here are some hints for choosing a good password.

• Use at least eight characters long password.
• Contain different character types in a password, e.g.: upper and lower case letters, numeric and symbol characters.
• Use passwords that are hard to guess but easy to remember.
• Change your password regularly.
• Do not use the same password for different log-ons.

Other hackers may take advantage of this incident and send out phishing email or perform social engineering attack. Never change your social networking web site passwords by clicking the link in an email that you did not request and be cautious when you receive posts or messages with malicious URLs from your friends. Check the URLs before you click on it.