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.

A Russian Cyber-crime mastermind Jailed !

A Russian cybercrime mastermind who was behind a group that hijacked 30 million computers around the world has been jailed.

Georgiy Avanesov was convicted of computer sabotage in an Armenian court and told to serve four years.
The court heard how Avanesov, aged in his 20s, carried out so-called denial-of-service attacks, which exploit security weaknesses in computers, and used a botnet – a network of compromised PCs – to target victims.
The Bredolab botnet, as it was known, sent out 3.6 billion junk emails every day at its height.
It also used servers in the Netherlands and was hired out to criminals who used it to obtain information such as bank passwords and carry out attacks on websites.
Avanesov was arrested at Armenia’s Yerevan airport in 2010 after the Dutch server network was dismantled.