While Yahoo may be seizing the lion’s share of bad press and unsavory headlines for its second poorly documented consumer password account breach, Linkedin was able to fly relatively under the radar with its news about a Lynda.com data breach.
Microsoft’s newly owned LinkedIn business which is parent company to Lynda.com has reported that hackers accessed data information of some of its 9.5 million customer accounts. That data breached roughly consumed customer information such as names, email addresses, and courses viewed according to a report from VentureBeat.
Since the breach, LinkedIn stepped in and is now fielding questions and concerns about the data hacked.
These credentials were “cryptographically salted hashed,” the spokesperson said, referring to a pair of security measures that render stored data harder to decipher.
The LinkedIn spokesperson clarified in a follow-up note that the company’s information security team used the “PBKDFv2” algorithm to hash the passwords. (Some hashing algorithms, like “bcrypt,” an industry standard, are considered superior to others, like “MD5,” a more easily crackable predecessor.)
Again, this is LinkedIn’s second announcement of data breaching this year as this Lynda.com news follows an earlier headline this year where LinkedIn admitted to 2012 hack that resulted in 167 million accounts compromised.
As for LinkedIn’s answer to the breach, the company has already reset the accounts of some 55,000 customer passwords this past weekend. To find out whether or not you might be among the compromised accounts, visit Lynda.com for more information.
