As this story broke it was hard to know just who was in anyone’s professional network, especially if you haven’t changed your LinkedIn password in the last 4 years.
This is the news that more than one hundred million LinkedIn login ids, complete with passwords are apparently being advertised for
sale by a hacker.
According to some reputable sources, the IDs aren’t part of any new security hack, but instead come from a breach that happened 4 years ago.
LinkedIn
had taken preventative steps at the time, resetting the accounts of all those thought to have had their login details stolen.
Unfortunately for LinkedIn, it has now transpired that the original scale of the security leak was far worse than they could have imagined, possibly running into millions of stolen IDs.
According to tech news website Motherboard, only about 6.5 million IDs and passwords were posted online after the 2012 theft, and LinkedIn had hoped that that had been that.
But now the hacker has posted the new ID data on Dark Web illegal marketplace,
The Real Deal, for just 5 bitcoin, (around) $2000US.
The hacker claims that there were a grand total of 167 million accounts in the stolen data.
