Data breach costs LinkedIn up to $1 million

Due to one of the year's largest reported data breaches, business networking site LinkedIn has announced that it already has taken up to a $1 million hit.

During its second-quarter earnings call on Thursday, LinkedIn CFO Steve Sordello said the costs involved with recuperating from the incident so far range from $500,000 to $1 million, which is going toward forensic work and “other elements” relating to the breach.

According to the call, the 175-million-member company continues to strengthen its website's security to protect members and is expected to add $2 million to $3 million in costs in the current quarter toward those efforts.

“Since [the breach], we have redoubled our efforts to ensure the safety of our member account on LinkedIn by further improving password-strengthening measures and enhancing the security of our infrastructure and data,” Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, said during the call. “The health of our network as measured by number of growth and engagement remains as strong as it was prior to the incident.”

Earlier this year, attackers dumped 6,458,020 encrypted LinkedIn passwords on a Russian forum seeking assistance in decoding them.

The stolen passwords were camouflaged using an outdated cryptographic hash function, SHA-1, created by the National Security Agency. In addition to this weakness, LinkedIn failed to add additional security layers, such as salting the passwords, a technique which randomly appends a string of characters.

Following the attack, LinkedIn confirmed in a blog post the addition of new security layers, including the salting of passwords.