Russian hacker leaks 6.5million LinkedIn account passwords

Around six million users of the social networking site LinkedIn have had their passwords stolen, according to technology experts.
The website, popular with businessmen and women, has confirmed that it was hacked after a file containing 6.5million encrypted passwords was published on a Russian hackers’ web forum.
Experts are now advising users to change their passwords on LinkedIn and other websites for which they use the same password. 

They also warn that the stolen passwords are probably already in the hands of criminals if the security breach is genuine.
LinkedIn has more than 160million users in 200 countries and nine million in the UK.

‘Our advice is to change your LinkedIn password. And if you use the same password on other accounts, change it there too.’

The news comes after LinkedIn was forced to change its policies after it was accused of a privacy breach discovered by web security researchers.
The problem concerned a mobile app which sent unencrypted calendar entries, such as phone numbers and passwords for conference calls, to LinkedIn servers without the users’ knowledge.
On Tuesday a hacker with the username ‘dwdm’ appealed for help on the Russian hackers’ forum to decrypt the files and access the original passwords.
By yesterday morning, hackers claimed to have revealed hundreds of thousands of passwords.