Nearly 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen from the site today. While it’s unlikely any changes were made to your account, the compromised passwords may be used by other programs that break into various accounts.

Here’s Mashable’s guide to find out if your account was comprised (like mine). If it was, change your password immediately. It would also be wise to change it on all sites that use the same password.

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that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.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

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our members. We take the security of our members very seriously. If you haven’t read it already it is worth checking out my earlier blog post today about updating your password and other account security best practices.

As a young professional in the field this is something I’ve thought plenty about. Right now Social Media is hotter than ever, technologically, and of course financially. But have we learned from our mistakes during the dotCOM Bubble? Are we headed down the same path? Check out this Infographic Report from G+:

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