117 Million LinkedIn credentials offered for sale

A hacker who goes by the name “Peace,” is offering 117 million LinkedIn credentials for 5 bitcoin, the precious data come from the 2012 hack.

According to Motherboard, a hacker who goes by the name “Peace,” is offering personal details of 117 million LinkedIn users for 5 bitcoin (around $2,200). The hacker is offering the data in the popular black marketplace The Real Deal, he confirmed to Motherboard that data results from the data breach suffered by LinkedIn in 2012.

Following the hack, around 6.5 million encrypted passwords were leaked online, but clearly the incident has a greter magnitude.

“LinkedIn.com was hacked in June 2012 and a copy of data for 167,370,910 accounts has been obtained by LeakedSource which contained emails only and passwords. You can search the hacked LinkedIn.com database and many others on our main site. If you are in this database, contact us and we will remove you from our copy for free.” states LeakedSource who analyzed the archive that includes 167 million accounts, on them roughly 117 million have both emails and encrypted passwords.

According to LeakedSource, the precious archive was kept by a Russian hacker crew.

LeakedSource confirmed that the passwords were hashed with the SHA1 algorithm, with no “salt.”

“One of the operators of LeakedSource told Motherboard in an online chat that so far they have cracked “90% of the passwords in 72 hours.” reported Lorenzo Bicchierai from Motherboard.

Giving a look to the top passwords in the LinkedIn credentials included in the archive we can notice that the top 5 are:

1	123456	753,305
2	linkedin	172,523
3	password	144,458
4	123456789	94,314
5	12345678	63,769

Every other comment is superfluous … shall we?

Of course, all the users that are still using the same credentials included in the archive are at risk and urge to change it as soon as possible.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – LinkedIn credentials, data breach)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.