Leaked LinkedIn database appears online as a download
British developer Thomas White, also known as Cthulhu, has put online the entire LinkedIn database that went up for sale in May. The database contains the login details of 117 million LinkedIn users.
At the end of May, LinkedIn confirmed that the data had been leaked, which was offered for sale online earlier that month for a price of five bitcoins, about 2000 euros. White now offers the database, which consists of multiple text files in a 6.9GB rar archive, as a torrent download. This means that the data is available to a large group of people. Cracking the passwords hashed with sha1 is not a big problem without salt.
White has previously hosted leaked databases under his Cthulhu name, for example of the hack on dating site Ashley Madison and the data of the Italian company Hacking Team. It’s unclear if Cthulhu plans to host the leaked Tumblr and MySpace databases as well once they become available.
33 million Twitter credentials were also offered for sale online. The company announced Friday that it had reset the passwords of the affected accounts. This would involve ‘millions of accounts’. The company denies any hacking. The recent data breaches again highlight the importance of unique and strong passwords, after the data appeared online, several user accounts were broken into, including Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter account.