Oh dear. For those of you who use LinkedIn (side note: please explain your LinkedIn love in the comments), they've just sent word that some of your passwords have been compromised. It seems that some of the passwords were stolen, so those accounts that have been or risk the possibility of being messed with, have been reset. And according to PC World, an estimated 6.5 million passwords were posted online on a forum based in Russia. "More than 200,000 of these passwords have reportedly been cracked so far."

Vicente Silveira of LinkedIn explains:

We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:

1. Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.

2. These members will also receive an email from LinkedIn with instructions on how to reset their passwords. There will not be any links in these emails. For security reasons, you should never change your password on any website by following a link in an email.

3. These affected members will receive a second email from our Customer Support team providing a bit more context on this situation and why they are being asked to change their passwords.

It is worth noting that the affected members who update their passwords and members whose passwords have not been compromised benefit from the enhanced security we just recently put in place, which includes hashing and salting of our current password databases.

Let this be a good reminder to update all of your passwords on a regular basis.