Thu, 7 Jun 2012

Professional social network LinkedIn is confident in its privacy and security procedures, following a leak of 6.5m users’ passwords.

A blog post from company director Vicente Silveira says that those members whose passwords have been compromised – as well as all those whose passwords have not been – “benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases”. Hashing and salting is an advanced web security encryption technique.

The site has admitted that millions of users’ passwords have been leaked. The information has turned up on a web forum run by a Russian company, which also includes personal information for users of dating site eharmony.

Speaking to Recruiter, a spokesperson for LinkedIn would not comment beyond what was said in two blog posts from Silveira, even when asked what the company had to say to premium and professional users of the social network for whom LinkedIn is an important tool.

One of the blogs includes instructions for updating a user’s LinkedIn password.

The latter concludes: “We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously.”