There is news circulating today that a collection (estimates of 6.5 million) of LinkedIn passwords have reportedly been posted on a Russian hacker web forum. Linkedin are currently investigating if any security breaches have taken place, and have released a blog post on account security best practices.

While the passwords remain encrypted – the hackers who stole the data apparently asked others for help to decipher the files. Apparently, the encryption is quite easy to break though, which brings us to xkcd’s insightful infographic below on password strengths.

Also from: Preliminary analysis of LinkedIn user passwords

I thought it’d be fun to try to guess some passwords just based on intuition alone, using LeakedIn to check the guesses. Here’s some of the more entertaining passwords that are in the database: ‘obama2012′, ‘Obama2012′, ‘paladin’, ‘linkedinsucks’, ‘fuckyou’, ‘godsaveus’, ‘ihatemyjob’, ‘ihatejews’ (tsk tsk), ‘manson’, ‘starbucks’, ‘qwer1234′, ‘qwerty’, ‘aoeusnth’ (hello fellow dvorak user!), ‘bigtits’ (really?), ‘colbert’, ‘c0lbert’, ‘bieber’, ‘ilovejustin’, ’50cent’, ‘john316′, ‘john3:16′, ‘John3:16′, ’1cor13′, ‘psalm23′, ‘exodus20′, ‘isiah40′, ‘Matthew6:33′, ‘hebrews11′ (bible verses are quite popular passwords!).

(via xkcd)