Update: LinkedIn confirmed the compromised accounts

It looks like reports of the 6.5 million compromised LinkedIn accounts are true. This was confirmed by Vicente Silveira; a LinkedIn Director, saying that LinkedIn have disable all accounts associated with the compromised passwords and will be email notification on how to reset their passwords and explanation as why they need to change their password.

Vincente also said that they are still investigating the issues and will most likely hear another announcement from them once they’re done.

In the meantime, here’s the complete announced by LinkedIn:

An Update on LinkedIn Member Passwords Compromised
Vicente Silveira, June 6, 2012

We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:

1. Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.
2. These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in these emails. For security reasons, you should never change your password on any website by following a link in an email.
3. These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.

It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously. If you haven’t read it already it is worth checking out my earlier blog post today about updating your password and other account security best practices.

Here’s another good suggestion, aside from changing the password to your LinkedIn account, you may also want to change the password to any web site or online account that you have using the same email address and password that you used for your LinkedIn account.