NEW YORK (CNNMoney, David Goldman) — Russian hackers released a giant list of passwords this week, and on Wednesday security researchers identified their likely source: business social networking site LinkedIn.
The 6.5 million leaked passwords were posted Monday on a Russian online forum, camouflaged with a common cryptographic hash called SHA-1. It’s a format that’s considered weak in its raw form. Roughly half of the hashed passwords have already been decoded and posted online in human-readable text.
Several security researchers tweeted Wednesday that they have found their passwords among those that were revealed. Web security firm Sophos said it matched many of its researchers’ own passwords that are used exclusively on LinkedIn.
Here’s what those probing the hack consider the biggest giveaway: countless passwords on the list contain the word “LinkedIn.”
On a popular hacker forum, many reported finding passwords such as “linkedout,” “recruiter,” “googlerecruiter,” “toprecruiter,” “superrecruiter,” “humanresources” and “hiring.”
A spokeswoman from LinkedIn said the social network is “unable to confirm that any security breach has occurred,” but it is continuing to investigate.
There’s good news and bad news about this break-in.
The good news is that so far, no user names have been discovered in the list. It’s highly recommended that you change your password, but after that you should be okay.
The bad news is that LinkedIn was apparently using an outdated form of cryptography to secure its users’ private information. If these are in fact LinkedIn passwords, the company should have known better than to guard its lists with just SHA-1, experts say.
The problem with SHA-1 is that it translates the same text the same way each time. So if your password is “password” and your friend’s password is also “password,” they will be hashed exactly the same way. That makes reversing the process to uncover the original password significantly easier.
That’s why security experts recommend that companies with giant lists of private data like LinkedIn add another security layer called “salt.”
Salt randomly adds another piece of information to the password. It could be a user name, first name, or even a random number — the point is that it changes the underlying text enough to make it almost impossible to decode.
“Any organization using SHA-1 without salting user passwords is running a great risk — much higher than they should,” said Per Thorsheim, chief information security advisor at Norwegian IT services company EVRY. “We’ve seen this time and time again. This is not good practice. Salt should be a minimum.”
The potentially worse news is that far more than 6.5 million users’ passwords were likely stolen.
Each hashed password on the hacked list is unique, according to those who have looked at the data. Since SHA-1 encodes all identical passwords the same way, it’s very likely that multiple people among LinkedIn’s 150 million users had the same password.
What’s really bad is that we don’t know the identity of the hackers or what they’re capable of.
If they simply stole a bunch of passwords without any way to match them with user names, it’s a wake-up call for LinkedIn but not much more. But the attack came from Russia, a country known for its expert and mischievous hackers. There could be more fallout.
“If it’s random idiots that have done this, the chances are slim that they could actually exploit this to the amount where it would actually hurt LinkedIn or you and me,” Thorsheim said. “But if this is organized crime and these guys are serious, then the damage potential is very high.”
The password hack is the second piece of bad security news to hit LinkedIn this week.
The company’s mobile application was caught collecting data from users’ calendars and sending it back to the company for analysis. The tool matches up information about the people users are scheduled with information from their LinkedIn profiles.
LinkedIn responded in a blog post that it seeks permission first, but it pledged to be more transparent about the way it collects and analyzes its users’ personal information.
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