Never a dull moment when it comes down to hackers breaching security walls and escaping with all the goodies. The latest to fall victim to a pre-emptive hacker strike is the professional social network, LinkedIn. Apparently, hackers have breached the walls and stole over 6.5 million account passwords, what are the odds yours is a part of the stolen? You best saddle up and change that password before you regret playing "the brave one."

Director at LinkedIn, Vicente Silveira, confirmed the hack on the company's blog, along with assuring users that those with compromised passwords would get an email with steps outlined on how to change their passwords. This is all good, but we do not recommend sitting around to wait and see if your account is among those compromised, it is better to be proactive and change your password beforehand.

Where are the passwords now?

It has been reported that a file containing all 6.5 million passwords have been uploaded to an online forum in Russia; however, getting to the passwords is not easy. The file containing the passwords is protected using the SHA-1 algorithm, but sadly, that is not enough. So far, over 200,000 hashed passwords have been cracked which can pose threats to user accounts.

If this alone does not prove the danger looming over LinkedIn users head, we don't know what will.

Changing your password is quite easy, follow this link to LinkedIn setting page and click the change link which is next to password below your profile. Look, it matters not how difficult your password is to remember or how long it is, this threat is real. If you use the same password for other accounts, you might want to change those as well, all to its own unique password.

Having problems remembering all your passwords?

How about using LastPass? LastPass helps you to generate strong passwords along with saving them in the cloud for easy access. It works wonderfully, plus there are apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone along with plug-ins for all the major desktop browsers.