6.5 million LinkedIn accounts were stolen on Wednesday and now password management firm LastPass has released a secure tool that allows users to check if their password was among those stolen.
LinkedIn acknowledged the security breach after it was announced on a Russian forum and said it would contact affected users with details on how to change their password.
While usernames were not associated with the breach it is expected that user passwords will be added to a dictionary list for other programs looking to gain access to user accounts and hackers will likely use the passwords to reverse-engineer various cryptography systems.
LastPass works by taking your password and computing its SHA-1 hash at which point it sends that information to LastPass.com which searched the list of 6.5 million leaked password hashes to see if your password was compromised.
In any case its a smart move to always change your password after any type of security breach so regardless of LastPass results you should login to your LinkedIn account and change your password.
You can find the LastPass tool here: https://lastpass.com/linkedin/
well done guys!