Update: 117 million LinkedIn email credentials found for sale on the dark web

1 min.

May 26, 2016

The 2012 LinkedIn data breach may be the breach that just keeps on giving with the news that 117 million customer email credentials originating from that hack were found for sale on the dark web prompting the professional social network to invalidate the account passwords.
The initial story came from Motherboard, which reported it was contacted by someone going by the name “Peace” who said he was selling the data set on an illegal market place called The Real Deal for 5 Bitcoins, or about $2,200. The 117 million credentials come from a larger 167 million data dump of accounts that were supposedly grabbed when LinkedIn was breached in 2012.
Amit Ashbel, Checkmarx director of product marketing and cyber security evangelist, said LinkedIn’s poor handling of its customer’s data four years ago lead directly to today’s situation.
“LinkedIn could have definitely prevented the impact of this breach four years ago if they were using strong encryption techniques. That might not have prevented the breach itself but the data would be of much less use,” he told SCMagazine.com in an email.
 
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