FBI to hunt down hackers behind Linkedin password leak

Social networking site Linkedin is working with FBI to track down those stole password of its around 6.5 million members.

“We take this criminal activity very seriously so we are working closely with the FBI as they aggressively pursue the perpetrators of this crime,” Director at LinkedIn, Mr Vicente Silveira said in his blog post.

India is second largest market for LinkedIn after the US. It has over 15 million members and has seen 300 per cent growth its member base since start of its operation.

The company, on June 6, learnt that approximately 6.5 million hashed (secured) LinkedIn passwords were posted on a hacker site.

“Most of the passwords on the list appear to remain hashed and hard to decode, but unfortunately a small subset of the hashed passwords was decoded and published,” Mr Silveira said.

He further clarified that company is not aware of any member information being published and only information published was the passwords themselves.

LinkedIn Director said that company has disabled passwords of members that company believes were at risk.

“Based on our investigation, those members whom we believed were at risk, and whose decoded passwords already had been published, had their passwords quickly disabled and were sent an email by the Customer Service team,” he said.

He said that LinkedIn has not disabled password of members who were not at risk as per its investigation.