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Why Your LinkedIn Password Wasn’t Very Good Anyway [skillcrush]
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Fix your LinkedIn Password, now!
Reports are spreading that 6.46 million LinkedIn passwords have been leaked online. The hacker who has them seems to have released the passwords but not the associated email addresses. That said, you should definitely change your LinkedIn password ASAP, as well as change your password on any other service where you are using that same one.
Why the urgency to change your password?
It turns out that the LinkedIn passwords are encrypted, but poorly. Someone won’t be able to just read your password; but with a little work and a little hacker-sense will be able to figure out what it is.
This isn’t just about LinkedIn. Once someone has your email address and password for LinkedIn, they’ll write programs to automatically test the combination on other major sites out there. So if you use the same password anywhere else around the Net, change it now!
Make sure that your new password is secure. For years you have been encouraged to make your passwords using a combination of letters, numbers and punctuation (like P4ssw0rd$##). As it turns out, those passwords are hard for people to remember and easy for computers to crack.
We recommend that instead, you use a nonsense phrase like “I love steamboat pie” or “unicorn free america radio.” Something that’s easy for you to remember, uses at least a few words, and includes spaces!
To learn more about password security read our term onBrute Force Attack, a common way to break into password-protected accounts.
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Skillcrush is an interactive community-driven way to learn new tech skills and share them with others. We created Skillcrush because, like you, we wanted to learn about the web and all of the wondrous things that you could do with it in an open, supportive, and highly interactive way. Based in New York City, Skillcrush launched our pre-pre-Beta in April 2012. We’re working hard to create a bunch of fun features, including interactive and video-based tutorials, that we’ll be rolling out in August.
Thank you for introducing me to Skillcrush! I am going to start using it now!
Crazy that it's easier to crack a password where you change the letters to numbers and add things at the end than a random phrase!
Thanks for the tip! I didn't realize that it was beneficial to use nonsense phrases for passwords -- good to know!