Suckers this way

Social Networks Popularity (Lynch, 2011)

As social networking becomes an ever increasing part of our on-line lives, some news this week must surely raise concerns over how much personal information is left on-line. Linkedin has been hacked with over 6 Million users passwords on the list. An interesting spin off, Osborne(2012) invites users to enter their passwords to see if they are on the list. Get real you may work for the Guardian but seriously? You want me to type in my password to a site? What a great way to collect additional passwords. Needless to say I didn't put my password in but I thought I would try with 'bollocks' instead (forgive my French). Surprisingly it was on the list. So someone out there is using this as there password on linkedin, amazing.

Passwords like this are so predictable my password is much better its 'HyrJ3t%23a' very difficult to hack because its not a word, has upper and lower case and a non standard character. Now are you thinking 'the idiot has just put his password on a website', well I will leave you to ponder over that but if you check it you will find it has not been hacked - YET.

There is no doubt the trend in social networking is on the rise and as Lynch (2011) graphically represents Linkedin is up there with the best. I am off to change my password now I think.

References
Lynch,L. (2011) ‘How college professors use Facebook’, Schools.com, April 27[online], http://www.schools.com/visuals/college-professors-on-facebook.html (08 Jun 2012).

Osborne, H.(2012) ‘LinkedIn hacking: a timely internet security reminder’, The Guardian, 7 June 2012 , [online] http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/work-blog/2012/jun/07/linkedin-hacking-internet-security (08 Jun 2012).