117 Million LinkedIn Account For Sale On Dark Web

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.

The number of stolen LinkedIn IDs is thought to be in the millions

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.

In what must come as some minor relief to the professional networking site there is at the time of writing no new evidence that the for-sale IDs are the result of a new hack.

According to the hackers, one of whom, goes by the name of ‘Peace,’ 90% of the stolen IDs had their passwords cracked in under 72 hours.

So should you be worried?

Well, if you haven’t used LinkedIn in around 4 years, or can’t remember the  last time you changed your password, and you tend to use similar passwords for all your online accounts, then maybe.  At the very least, you should set about changing your login credentials for your LinkedIn profiled, and maybe also your main email account.

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