If you cast your minds back to the summer of 2012 then you’ll vaguely remember something about LinkedIn being hacked. Data was stolen and there were plenty of red faces in the social networks office, I’m sure.

Despite the huge scale of the hack, LinkedIn carried on and everything slowly got back to normal.

That is, until today. A hacker is advertising 117 million logins and passwords, from the breach back in 2012. What’s particularly odd (and potentially alarming) is that the number on offer is much larger than previously thought.

Whilst there’s plenty for LinkedIn and the authorities to do in order to track down the criminals, what can you do right now to protect yourself?

Here’s a few tips you can do, right now, to ensure that your LinkedIn account is kept safe:

1: Change your password. RIGHT NOW. If you’re not sure how strong your password is, test sample passwords with our password checker here.

2: Enable two-factor authentication. Learn how to do this here.

3: If you were using the same password on different accounts (email, social networks, etc) change it everywhere ASAP to ensure that hackers can’t log into your other accounts. And use different passwords from now on — reusing the same password is dangerous.

And that’s it. Do you have any other tips you’d recommend to keep your social accounts secure? Let us know in the comments below.