Happy Friday my friend,
If you're a job seeker or know someone might be from recent events, you already know how important LinkedIn can be. Unfortunately a new wave of hacks are slamming LinkedIn, resulting in accounts getting locked out, erased, held for ransom and even hijacked by attackers.
Highlights
LinkedIn has gone dark over the past few months and not responding to users, presumably while they figure this out.
Victims have been turned to Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft forums for any sort of assistance.
There are signs of a breakout based on Google Trends, where search terms about LinkedIn account hack or recovery has increased by 5,000+% over the past few months.
Why are they doing this? Because LinkedIn accounts can be valuable for social engineering, phishing and job offer scams that can lead to multi-million dollar cyber-heists such as the $640 million theft N. Korea pulled last year.
The Takeaway
The LinkedIn attackers seem to be using leaked credentials or brute-force to take control of a large number of accounts at scale. If you get a temporary account lock when trying to log in, it's likely that your account was targeted and either your strong password or 2-factor code stopped the bad guys. You'll have to verify some personal information and reset your password to get back in.
If you have a LinkedIn account, now would be a good time to review the security measures you've activated, enable 2FA, and switch to a unique and long password.
Simple, right?
Stay safe out there.
-Attila
New Friday Funnies! ChatGPT's joke for today on the topic of LinkeIn: Why did the scarecrow win an award on LinkedIn? Because he was outstanding in his field of connections!