Third Party Steals Information on 55,000 Online Learners

Fifty-five thousand victims of a data breach may not seem like a lot. But 9.5 million is significant. And although Lynda.com claims that only the 55,000 were affected, it is still letting 9.5 million people know of the situation and making some recommendations to them for securing their accounts. Those millions had “learner” data in the system, but no password information.

There has been no reported evidence that any of the stolen information has been used inappropriately or been made available publicly. However, the company has forced a reset of the passwords for the victims that were directly affected and is recommending others do so as well.

Whenever changing passwords, remember to make them a minimum of eight characters and include upper and lower case letters, a number or more, and a special character or more. Avoid using actual words, as those can be pretty easy to crack.

If you have a hard time remembering passwords for all of your online sites, consider this tip from Jim Stickley of Stickley on Security. Come up with one six character “base” password or phrase that you can easily remember. Then take characters from the website on which you have an account and add them to your base password to make at least eight. For example, choose a complex base of “XtE%3.” If the site you are going to is Bob.com, you could use the first and last character to make your password for that site, and that site only “XtE%3Bb.” The odds of having a duplicate password for multiple sites is very low, which means your passwords will all be unique and therefore not subject to password re-use, should one of the sites you visit be breached.

What is “learner data,” you may be asking. It makes more sense when you know that Lynda.com is an online learning platform. Its customers can take classes to learn business, technology, software, and other topics to help them meet their professional goals. The company was acquired by LinkedIn in 2015 for $1.5 billion. Earlier this month, LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion.