In Pictures: Top 25 network and IT industry stories of 2012

LinkedIn breached

LinkedIn was supposed to be the serious guy in the social media room among juveniles like Twitter and Facebook, serving business professionals rather than kids and slackers with too much time on their hands. But a security breach revealed in June compromised 6 million-plus users’ passwords and sent LinkedIn scrambling to get users to change their security settings. The compromised passwords, on a Russian hacker forum, were easily decrypted because LinkedIn used only a basic hashing algorithm that fell far short of the industry standard. LinkedIn says it put into place additional security features for its passwords, including hashing and salting all of the company's password databases.