Lynda.com falls prey to hacking, 55,000 user accounts affected

Adding to the ever-expanding list of cyber-attacks, LinkedIn-owned Lynda.com has also fallen prey to hacking. The online learning company is notifying its 9.5 million users alerting them of a database hack that includes contact information and courses some users viewed.

The breach was confirmed to VentureBeat by a spokesperson who says that Lynda.com is alerting everyone of the third party access even if they were affected or not. The company believes that over 55,000 user accounts along with their passwords, learning data, courses viewed, and contact information were breached.

"We recently became aware that an unauthorised third party breached a database that included some of your Lynda.com learning data, such as contact information and courses viewed. We are informing you of this issue out of an abundance of caution," Lynda.com said in a note sent to its users.

"...and while we have no evidence that your specific account was accessed or that any data has been made publicly available, we wanted to notify you as a precautionary measure," the note reads.
If you think your account has been compromised, please contact its Support Center.

Lynda.com was acquired by LinkedIn for US$1.5 billion in a cash and stock deal. Later LinkedIn got acquired by Microsoft in an all-cash transaction worth US$26.2 billion. Hence currently, Lynda.com is actually a Microsoft’s subsidiary.

Lynda.com’s breach follows the recent cyber-attack announcement made by Yahoo disclosing its 2013 breach affecting one billion users.

LinkedIn faced a similar situation back in 2012. The 6.5 million users’ stolen account details were later seen on the dark web also. However, there's no word from the company confirming whether there's any connection between 2012 intrusion and the latest attack.