Leading business networking site, LinkedIn has said that the hackers have stolen passwords of some its users. The hackers have released 6.5 million stolen passwords there were released on a hacker portal in Russia.

The breach of the networking site is significant because of the amount of sensitive personal information stored by its users on the site. There are suggestions that the hackers might now dupe high level executives to spread malware. The site has informed its users to change their passwords.

The site did not announce how any of the leaked passwords were of its accounts but only said that it was continuing to investigate the breach of security. One of the networking site's developer, Chris Shiflett explained in his blog that the company converts a person's clear-text password into cryptographic representation using the SHA-1 algorithm and then stores this information.

The conversion is done on the browser through JavaScript and the password is not transmitted to any other place. It is believed that the hjackers havenot been able to convert all the coded data into actual passwords but it is likely that they are working to reveal the real passwords.

Meanwhile, a web-developer and his team from New York have released a new web-based application that will allow the users of business networking site, LinkedIn to find out if their pass work was among the 6.5 million stolen passwords.