Lynda.com Hacked; Impacts 55,000 Passwords

Lynda.com, the online learning unit of LinkedIn that is now a subsidiary of Microsoft, is the latest victim of a data hack.

According to a report, during the weekend Lynda.com sent out an email to certain users alerting them to the fact that the company was hacked, with fraudsters stealing contact information and courses that some of its users viewed. The report noted Lynda.com is also emailing about 9.5 million users whose passwords weren’t part of the database that was hacked. Fewer than 55,000 users’ passwords were impacted by the breach. Lynda.com reset the passwords of the impacted users and alerted them to the action via email. No credit card information was included in the hack, with a spokesperson saying in the report that the passwords were “cryptographically salted and hashed” and that “we have no evidence that any of this data has been made publicly available and we have taken additional steps to secure Lynda.com accounts.”

The revelation on the part of Lynda.com comes just days after Yahoo disclosed another older data breach.

Last week Yahoo said it believes an “unauthorized third party” stole data associated with more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013. That’s in addition to the half-million customers whose data was hacked in another incident that Yahoo disclosed in September. The company believes the August 2013 hack is “likely distinct” from the other incident. In November, Yahoo disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that law enforcement provided it with data files that a hacker claimed was Yahoo user data. Upon analyzing it with the help of outside forensic experts, Yahoo has said it turned out to be the company’s data.