LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner On Password Theft: With 174M Members, ‘Health Of Our Network’ Is Strong As Ever

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner today addressed the company’s earlier incident of password theft, saying that it doesn’t seem to have an effect on growth.

The theft, as well as the flurry of negative publicity, may have caused some members to question the professional social network’s ability to keep their data safe. However, during today’s conference call on the company’s second quarter earnings, Weiner said “the health of our network” remains “as strong as it was prior to the incident.”

The company’s growth numbers seem to back that up. LinkedIn added 13 million new members in the past quarter, bringing the total to 174 million members. It’s also seeing an average of 106 million unique visitors each month.

Back in June, it was revealed that 6.5 million million account passwords had been stolen and published online. LinkedIn hashed and salted its database, and it disabled accounts of members who were at “greatest risk”.

The company said that none of the email addresses associated with the passwords had been published, and that it hadn’t detected any unauthorized attempts to access members’ accounts.

Weiner said the company is still working to improve its security. The company is taking a $2 to $3 million charge for the next quarter to further invest in this area.

With over 100 million users representing over 200 countries around the world, LinkedIn is a fast-growing professional networking site that allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. Individuals have the ability to create their own professional profile that can be viewed by others in their network, and also view the profiles of their own contacts. Competitors to LinkedIn include sites such as XING, Doostang and Ecademy. Of note, LinkedIn won...

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Jeff Weiner is the CEO of LinkedIn, where he started in December of 2008 as Interim President. He came to LinkedIn from positions as an Executive-in-Residence for leading Venture Capital firms Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. Prior to joining Accel and Greylock, Weiner served in various leadership roles at Yahoo for over seven years, most recently as the Executive Vice President of Yahoo’s Network Division. In this position he led a team of over 3,000 employees, managing products reaching...

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