Around six million users of the social networking site LinkedIn have had their passwords stolen, according to technology experts.
The website, popular with businessmen and women, has confirmed that it was hacked after a file containing 6.5million encrypted passwords was published on a Russian hackers' web forum.
 |
| A Russian hacker claims to have stolen more than six million passwords from work-oriented social network LinkedIn |
Experts are now advising users to change their passwords on LinkedIn and other websites for which they use the same password.
'We want to provide you with an update on this morning's reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts,' said LinkedIn in a post on its official account.
They also warn that the stolen passwords are probably already in the hands of criminals if the security breach is genuine.
LinkedIn has more than 160million users in 200 countries and nine million in the UK.
Graham Cluley, of internet security firm Sophos, said he believed the breach was genuine and warned that the passwords were now likely to be in the hands of criminals.
He added: 'We've confirmed there are LinkedIn passwords in the data. We did this by searching through the data for passwords that we at Sophos use only on LinkedIn. We found those passwords in the data. We also saw that hundreds of the passwords contain the word Linkedin.
'Our advice is to change your LinkedIn password. And if you use the same password on other accounts, change it there too.'
© Daily Mail, London
|
E-mail
