LinkedIn

Last week there was no escaping news of the latest data breach. The LinkedIn hack of 2012 which we thought had "only" exposed 6.5M password hashes (not even the associated email addresses so in practice, useless data), was now being sold on the dark web [https://motherboard.vice.com/read/another-day-another-hack-117-million-linkedin-emails-and-password] . It was allegedly 167 million accounts and for a mere 5 bitcoins (about US$2.2k) you could jump over to the Tor-based trading site, pay your Bi...

Update: 17 Feb 2014: Sanity has prevailed and the service has now been pulled [http://www.zdnet.com/linkedin-dumps-intro-in-services-overhaul-7000026123/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LinkedIn Intro [https://intro.linkedin.com] has already become known by many names: A dream for attackers [http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/25/5027334/linkedin-intro-security-concerns-bishop-fox-mandiant] , A nightmare for email security and privacy [http://ven...

No really, this is my LinkedIn password: y>8Q^<6mqKEA4hac Well it was my LinkedIn password until earlier today when it became apparent that LinkedIn had suffered what could only be described as a massive security breach [http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/06/technology/linkedin-password-hack/index.htm?iid=SF_T_Lead] . The disclosure of 6 million passwords used in one of the world’s premier social networking sites is nothing short of astonishing. But what’s also astonishing is that this exercise onc...

The final catalyst for me eventually taking the leap into the blogosphere came from an unexpected source. It was actually my own response to a Stack Overflow Question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1352597/continue-education-or-put-myself-out-there/1353125#1353125] where I’d suggested that one of the best ways to make yourself more marketable as a software developer is to have an active online profile. I don’t necessarily mean to try and achieve semi celebrity status like Scott Guthrie [ht...