LikedIn passwords hacked

On Wednesday, the business networking LinkedIn said it is investigating a user's post from a Russian forum that claims he hacked LinkedIn, uploading 6,458,020 encrypted passwords to the site as proof, International Business Times reported.


"Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords," the company tweeted on Wednesday morning. "Stay tuned for more."

This hacking claim comes just hours after the company officially responded to alleged privacy issues in its iOS app, after Skycure Security discovered that LinkedIn automatically sends user calendar entries into its servers, including the subject, location, the time of meeting, as well as the meeting notes.

"You may have seen a few press stories highlighting concerns about how your data is used in the opt-in calendar feature of our mobile phone apps," said Joff Redfern, LinkedIn's mobile product head. "For those not familiar with our calendar feature, with your permission, we sync with your mobile device's calendar to provide information about the people you are about to meet by showing you their LinkedIn profile. ... That information is sent securely over SSL and we never share or store your calendar information."

LinkedIn has been swift to respond to these issues -- at least on its company blog and on its Twitter account -- but the company needs to post these notes on its homepage. In this way, LinkedIn is being extremely irresponsible not to tell people that they need to change their passwords.