It has always been a challenge to recover access to social media accounts that have been hijacked. Many people use LinkedIn (as well as other social media accounts) for business, so losing access cause a financial problem.

Cyberint is reporting that “many” LinkedIn users have been complaining about account takeovers or lockouts and an inability to resolve the problems through LinkedIn support.

Actually, not being able to recover access to hijacked social media accounts is a pretty common problem. Given that accounts are mostly free and customer service is non-existent, account recovery is a challenge.

Some LinkedIn users have paid a ransom to recover their accounts. The attackers threatened to delete the accounts if the owner did not pay the ransom.

LinkedIn has not publicly said what is going on, but reports are that their support response time has increased – indicating a higher than normal volume of support requests.

Bleeping Computer has seen complaints on Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft forums saying that LinkedIn support has not been helpful recovering the breached accounts.

Cyberint says there are signs of a breakout reflected in Google Trends where search terms about LinkedIn account hack or recovery record an increase of 5,000% over the past few months. 5,000% is a big number.

Here is the obvious part.

Attackers appear to be using leaked credentials or brute force their way in.

For accounts protected by strong passwords or two-factor authentication, the takeover attempts resulted in temporary account lockout by the platform.

Once the hackers successfully take over an account, they change the password to a .ru (Russia) email service account. Then the hackers turned on 2FA, making account recovery more difficult.

One possible reason for the break-ins is to use the compromised accounts to launch social engineering attacks against the people that are connected to the compromised accounts.

LinkedIn is not responding to media requests about this.

The moral of the story is to make sure that your social media account security is sufficient to protect your important accounts.

Credit: Bleeping Computer