LinkedIn apologized on Wednesday after Russian hackers exposed more than 6 million LinkedIn passwords. In a
blog post, the company said:
“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously.”
If your password was among the unlucky 6 million, you should expect to see an email from LinkedIn with instructions to reset it.
Meanwhile,
Ars Technica is reporting that 1.5 million passwords for the online dating site eHarmony were also posted online.
The LinkedIn breach exposed a few amusing and disturbing things about LinkedIn users and the network itself. Here are three of them:
1. It sparked an avalanche of jokes at LinkedIn’s expense.
When the news started to spread on Wednesday morning that LinkedIn had suffered a security breach, Twitter users started cracking jokes at the social network’s expense. For example:
Perhaps some of you reading this can relate to what Andy Cohen, a social media analyst with Thomson Reuters, had to say about Salmon’s tweet:
2. It revealed some bizarre passwords.
Any service that requires a password will have its share of odd passwords, but some of the examples from job hunters on LinkedIn seem exceptionally dark.
BuzzFeed compiled 23 of them, most of which are Safe For Work. Here are a few:
• anyjob
• lasttry
• hopeless
• solonely
• fireme
• hatemyjob
The list gets even more disturbing as it counts down to No. 1.
On a lighter note, (at least) one password was “bieber,” which inspired this tweet:
3. It’s more serious than you think.
All joking aside, the LinkedIn hack is significant because, as
Joe Wilcox wrote for betanews, the social network is geared toward business users so most of the people on the site are sharing their
real information.
Wilcox spoke with Cameron Camp of ESET security, who said:
“The difference with this hack, as opposed to many others, is that people put their real information about themselves professionally on the site, not just what party they plan on attending, ala Facebook and others. And every time one of your LinkedIn contacts updates their profile, you get updates from LinkedIn showing what’s happening. This has the aggregate effect of garnering a form of peer review on what you post about yourself, knowing that it is exposed potentially to those business or career contacts that have a direct impact on your life.”
Read the full story at
betanews.
Also, as
Mashable pointed out, the breach is terrible timing for the company, which is dealing with accusations that its mobile app may violate user privacy.
Kevin Allen contributing to this story.