Yesterday saw professional social network LinkedIn experience a DNS issue that resulted in some visitors being redirected to a domain sales page. The problem has now been resolved for the majority of users, and LinkedIn has acknowledged there was as an issue with this tweet:
Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience.
— LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013
However, LinkedIn hasn’t gone on to elaborate on how or why the situation occurred. Bryan Berg, co-founder of App.net, thinks there may have been something more sinister at work. Posting on App.net, he wrote:
“LinkedIn just got DNS hijacked, and for the last hour or so, all of your traffic has been sent to a network hosted by this company [confluence-networks.com]. And they don’t require SSL, so if you tried to visit, your browser sent your long-lived session cookies in plaintext.”
If what Berg thinks to be the case turns out to be reality, then it’s a possibility that the user cookies could be used by a third-party to compromise LinkedIn accounts. LinkedIn hasn’t issued any further updates on the situation, other than saying that they’ve identified that it is a DNS issue, and that they’re working on it.
Putting any potential third-party skullduggery to one side, the fact remains that a number of LinkedIn users were unable to access their accounts, nor any of the information stored on the business network. This is one of many instances that strengthens the argument for keeping an offline record of your social network content.
One such tool that allows you to do this is of course SocialSafe. To create your library of you, made up from the content from all your social networks, simply download the SocialSafe free trial from our website and start backing up your data now.