LinkedIn has been forced to email over nine million users of its Lynda online learning service after a small percentage were affected by a data breach.
The professional networking giant contacted 9.5 million users “out of an abundance of caution,” although the passwords of fewer than 55,000 are thought to have been compromised in the incident.
Those passwords, which have now been reset, were “cryptographically salted and hashed,” according to a statement seen by VentureBeat.
Although at the time of writing the firm had no official statement about the incident on its website, the email sent to users whose passwords were not compromised had the following:
“We recently became aware that an unauthorized third party breached a database that included some of your Lynda.com learning data, such as contact information and courses viewed. We are informing you of this issue out of an abundance of caution.
Please know that we have no evidence that this data included your password. And while we have no evidence that your specific account was accessed or that any data has been made publicly available, we wanted to notify you as a precautionary measure.”
Both the scale of the breach and the seemingly speedy response to it stand in stark contrast to the incident revealed by Yahoo last week.
The internet pioneer claimed details from over one billion accounts had been stolen back in 2013 – a year before it suffered a breach of 500 million user accounts.
To add insult to injury for the technology company, it only found out about the incident after being informed by the police.
The data in question, which included phone numbers, passwords, security questions and backup email addresses, has been up for sale on the darkweb for months, according to security firm InfoArmor.
In fact, it was apparently sold to three separate entities for $300,000 each, according to CNN.
Some of those affected are said to be employees of the FBI, NSA, the White House and UK officials.