LinkedIn

H-Online: Internet forums are currently circulating a list containing over six million password hashes which allegedly originate from LinkedIn. The passwords are being cracked collaboratively with about 300,000 passwords already published as plaintext. The list contains pure SHA1 hashes with no name or email addresses. If decrypted, the passwords will not easily give access to an appropriate account. However, it is probable that the person who captured the hashes also has the corresponding email addresses. In an initial sampling, The H‘s associates at heise Security didn’t find any known LinkedIn passwords in the list, but with over 160 million members that doesn’t mean a lot. The already cracked passwords often contain “linked” or even “linkedin” in the form, for example, of “lawrencelinkedin”. This suggests that the passwords actually come from the LinkedIn social network. However, this has not yet been confirmed. ...

Mashable: LinkedIn on Thursday announced it has 150 million members in its network, a 20 million increase over November. The figure was disclosed in a press release the company issued Thursday announcing its fourth quarter and full-year 2011 results. The company posted revenues of $167.7 million, beating the analysts’ consensus of $160 million for Q4. Adjusted profit was $0.12 cents per share, which beat analysts’ projections of 7 cents a share. LinkedIn’s stock was up more than 5% in after-hours trading. ...

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...

Apparently, Facebook isn’t the only online sphere where ninjas are becoming a problem — The LinkedIn Blog reports that the job title “Ninja” has become more and more popular since 2002. According to LinkedIn, those who deem themselves “ninjas” tend to work with computers, social media, design, customer service, advertising and finance, and — as you can see from the chart below — their ranks have been steadily growing since the dawn of the century. ...