Millions of eHarmony users have passwords exposed

eHarmony users searching for love could find someone else going on their dates, as the site has confirmed a password breach that has compromised the security of some of its members.

It appears to be part of the same incident earlier this week when a hacker posted 6.4 million hashed LinkedIn user passwords on a Russian forum.

Those 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords were mixed in with approximately 1.5 million passwords that appear to be from eHarmony, identified because many of the weaker passwords actually contain the owrd 'eharmony'.

And it's likely that those remaining are just the more difficult to crack passwords that were posted online for other users of password cracking forums of insidepro.com to help out with.

A 'small fraction'

In a statement, eHarmony's corporate communications manager Becky Teraoka said: "After investigating reports of compromised passwords, we have found that a small fraction of our user base has been affected. We are continuing to investigate but would like to provide the following actions we are taking to protect our members.

"As a precaution, we have reset affected members passwords. Those members will receive an email with instructions on how to reset their passwords."

We would advise users of both eHarmony and LinkedIn to change their passwords to something hard to crack, containing a mix of lower- and uppercase letters as well as numbers and symbols.

As yet there is no information as to how the passwords were acquired in the first place.

Via SlashGear