Now Might Be a Good Time To Change Your LinkedIn Password

Today LinkedIn announced that 6.5 million (yes million) encrypted passwords just made their way to…a Russian Hacker Forum. If you use LinkedIn, which there’s a good chance you do given that they have somewhere north of 120 million users. This is a major data breach and there’s something about the whole Russian Hacker Forum that really doesn’t sound like the best place for this data to have landed.

While these articles often tell you to change your password on the impacted service, I think people need to think about other accounts as well. Let’s face it, many people use the same username and password for many different services, or at least the same password since it’s hard to remember too many. If this data get decrypted, which it probably will given that it’s sitting on a Russian Hacker Forum then what’s to stop hackers from trying to access other accounts you might have?

If you’re anything like me you use a multitude of services and having one password exposed could expose more than you think. So, unless you’re a Russian Hacker (in which case you should be busy decrypting that data!) you should take this as an opportunity to make a new password and protect all of your accounts even more. Is this an emergency? No. Do you need to do this or you’ll suffer the consequences? Probably not. However when it comes to security I always believe it’s better to be safe than sorry.

(Photo Credit)

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton