What security lessons can be learned from LinkedIn?

Users are making it too easy for hackers.

If we take a closer look at the 6.5 million hashed LinkedIn passwords that leaked we find a large swathe of the user population are ignoring warnings of overly simplistic and obvious passwords. Would you believe the most common word or phrase found in a 160k sampling of the list was “link”?

And would you further shake your head in disbelief that “1234” and “12345” followed close behind. Rounding out the top 10 were “work,” “god,” “job,” “angel,” “the,” “ilove,” and “sex.”

More so than Facebook, LinkedIn is the social media of choice for business. So it is likely to be used by the users in your enterprise as part of their security-as-a-service (SaaS) profile. This makes their problem your problem.

If we learn anything from this debacle, it is that password management should be a priority for any organisation that …