LinkedIn Hack

If you have a cell phone or email, the following information is CRITICAL for you:

If you have a LinkedIn account, there is a 92% chance that ALL of the information LinkedIn has about you has been hacked. Here is an excerpt from a newsletter I receive:

"Microsoft’s LinkedIn platform just suffered a massive data breach.

This hack compromised 700 million user accounts, which is roughly 92% of all LinkedIn users. So it’s safe to say that if we have a LinkedIn account, our data has likely been exposed. . .

. . .Hackers have posted users’ physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, geolocation info, and even inferred salaries – data that LinkedIn keeps private. Much of this information is not available in the public domain.

So all LinkedIn users should be very careful right now. Those of us caught up in this hack could be prime targets for phishing and identity theft.

After all, cybercriminals now know our phone numbers, our email addresses, where we live, and our career histories.

[The author] has already received several phishing text messages since this breach. The texts prompt [him] to click a link and come from an unknown phone number. We should never do this.

Even if the text is contextual and related to something about us, please avoid the temptation. These links will install malware on our devices, which will report sensitive data back to the hackers.

This is [the author's] public service announcement for the week… Never click on links in emails or text messages unless you know for certain who they are from and what their purpose is.

Many times, these messages may look suspicious. But phishers can be sophisticated. For example, if we haven’t ordered any packages, we shouldn’t click on a text telling us our order is delayed.

. . .also, [try] never [to] answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize. Think about it – hackers also know who our friends and colleagues are based on our social media profiles. This could enable them to forge an elaborate deception.

Plus, sophisticated hackers even have ways of getting us to install malware over the phone."

Obviously, it's impossible to completely ignore all unknown phone numbers with some of our jobs. But we need to be EXTREMELY cautious when answering those calls.