Changing Your LinkedIn Password Still May Not Have Kept Your Account Safe

Re:Changing Your LinkedIn Password Still May Not Have Kept Y... by hackinthebochs on Saturday June 23, 2012 @04:47PM (#4151757)

It seems more likely that the person on the other end of the conversation simply did the "import gmail contacts" option, and during this process they noticed the correspondence between you and him. Then when you changed your email for linkedin that connection was broken.

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Re:Changing Your LinkedIn Password Still May Not Have Kept Y... by elangoc on Saturday June 23, 2012 @06:24PM (#4151973)

Although that might seem like a likely explanation, LinkedIn wasn't putting the "import email contacts" widget in your face like they do, now.

Of the two people I vividly remember as only vaguely familiar suggested people, neither was in my Gmail address book. I had a 2-sent-emails thread with one person, and no direct emails with the other. In 2007, Gmail might have already been auto-collecting contact info of people you email directly, but that can't explain the 2nd person.

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Re:Changing Your LinkedIn Password Still May Not Have Kept Y... by tedunangst on Saturday June 23, 2012 @05:27PM (#4151860)

Exactly. All of these "there's no way anyone could have known that" stories ignore the fact that there is another person who could have known and provided that info.

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Re:Changing Your LinkedIn Password Still May Not Have Kept Y... by elangoc on Saturday June 23, 2012 @06:39PM (#4151995)

That's a good point. I'll keep that in mind.

I'm still hesitant to feel like it explains everything -- in 2007, LinkedIn still didn't seem that ubiquitous (after all, FB was then just opening itself up to non-college students, and LinkedIn's target demog. was still the pre-internet generation). So there weren't a whole lot of people I knew on the site to begin with, and there wasn't anybody I knew in common on LinkedIn connecting me to at least 2 of the vaguely familiar people I knew. And those 2 people started getting suggested to me by the site at the same time -- it seems too coincidental that these people (and others) provided their email contacts to LinkedIn at exactly the same time.

One good takeaway is, despite it taking me 5 more years to learn my lesson, and the really hard way :-(, I'm now using KeePass and creating difficult, unique passwords for each site, and using git to sync across computers. That helps.

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