On the 18th May 2016, 117 Million LinkedIn passwords have been put up for sale online. This follows the huge leak of LinkedIn passwords back in 2012 where over 6.5 Million passwords were leaked online. To assist our clients we have put this basic article together to provide some basic instructions of how to change your LinkedIn password quickly to keep your account safe (and other accounts if you use the same password for everything….tut tut tut).
How to Change Your LinkedIn Password:
Please find below the steps required to change your LinkedIn password as well as some ideas further below on how to create unique strong passwords that are easy to remember:
- Login to LinkedIn
- Top right put your mouse over photo icon which displays menu
- From the menu choose ‘Privacy and Settings’
- On the new displayed page, under the ‘Basics’ section – choose ‘Change Password’
- Type your current password followed by your new password x 2 (before clicking save at the bottom – make sure the tick-box is checked to sign out of all sessions.
Advice and Guidance Regarding Better Passwords:
Before you go to change your password think about how you are going to secure it. Also think about how that each of your passwords should be different because if your PayPal password is compromised, then the next easiest attack is to go after your other accounts which you may be using the same password – Twitter, Email, website maintenance, bank accounts, etc. These few tricks can help you make a better password:
If you must use the same password, change how it ends. For example if its for Email and my normal password is ‘thingy’ then why not use something like ‘thingy-EmaiL515’ which is broken down to normal password + hyphen + function name with upper and lower case letters + 5 for first word number of characters + 1 for the hyphen + 5 for the functional number of letters. Although this sounds complicated, once you start using this kind of format it becomes very easy to come up with new passwords.
Alternatively, try using a familiar phrase like “I love to eat chocolate 7 days a week.” – and turn this into a password by using the first letter from each word. The password for this example would be ‘Iltec7daw.’ – not so easy for the hacker to break into. Any phrase will do, where you live, what you drive, things you enjoy doing – the list is endless.
One last and important factor to consider; if you can add the UK ‘£’ sign into the password this increases your resistance to attack significantly. Most password hacking tools are not developed in the UK but abroad. We are one of only a few nations that have this symbol on our keyboards and therefore the attack dictionaries very often do not support the character and therefore will find it significantly more difficult to attack your password – put one in as the separator or at the end, it will help a great deal.
Magikos IT has expert advice and guidance that can help businesses with all of their IT and IM&T issues. If you have any concerns, further questions or if you need some assistance, please get in touch with us. Click the button below or follow the link to the ‘Contact’page.