Time to change your passwords – 167 million users’ LinkedIn passwords now up for sale to hackers
By Stephen Pate – Zdnet and other sources are reporting that more than 160 million LinkedIn user passwords were hacked and now for sale on the dark web.
That’s substantially more than the 13 million LinkedIn accounts that were reported hacked last year. It’s about 40% of all LinkedIn subscribers and probably includes you and me.
It’s time to immediately change all LinkedIn passwords to something new and hard to guess.
That’s step one to protect yourself.
Many of those passwords were so simple like “password” or “123456”.
If you changed LinkedIn last year to some other simple password used for other sites, those sites are now exposed in the LinkedIn hack.
Step 2 is to review where else the same password is used and change them as well.
Most of us have easy-to-remember passwords for low threat sites like LinkedIn. Some of those sites contain enough information for identify theft or the door to other sites with our credit card numbers.
Passwords are a weak link in our personal security. LinkedIn’s carelessness is a warning.
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