LinkedIn has announced that they expects the revenue of the first quarter of this year to be at the level of $460 million, not $469 million as it was previously forecasted. Although a decline of 2%, the company's shares on the stock market sank by 15% after the announcement of these news.

Pulse or the company behind this applicatio is now owned by LinkedIn. This mobile application, designed to display news is available on all widespread platforms. Pulse was founded back in 2010 by two students at the Stanford University, Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari. It currently has over 30 million users (40% outside of the U.S.) in more than 190 countries all over the world,

It seems that LinkedIn cannot catch a break. After a rather large data breach that resulted in the theft of a large number of user account information (including unsalted passwords protected by an outdated encryption scheme) there is now a new phishing email making the rounds that is aimed specifically at LinkedIn users.  Although phishing emails that target users of social networks are nothing new this one is the first that we have seen that targets LinkedIn users and also appears to be sent directly to LinkedIn user email addresses.

And…. There has been another breach of a “cloud” service. Well, sort of. Adobe’s connectusers.com forum was broken into on Monday. The hack was allegedly performed by Egyptian hacker ViruS_HimA. The Forum was shut down on Tuesday night in response to the attack. Although at this time Adobe is still claiming that nothing beyond the customer forum was breached there is always the potential that other services were affected by the attack. The culprit in this case turns out to be bad password protection.

The big news story today is of the purchase of social news sharing site Digg to Betaworks for the small sum of $500,000. The world was shocked at this number considering the massive impact that Digg once had. When they first launched they were THE way to share your content on the internet.  Unfortunately Digg has had a series of bad management decisions as well as facing serious competition from rivals like Reddit, Stumbleupon and others. However, the story behind the $500k price tag might not be complete as new information has come to light about the way the company was sold in parts to different buyers.

There is more news about the LinkedIn Data Breach as security firm Sophos reports that roughly 3.5 Million of the hashed passwords have been cracked. This is about 60% of the 5.8 Million unique passwords that were grabbed from a password database on the popular business connection site. The speed in which the passwords were cracked is of concerning.

LinkedIn has confirmed that some of the roughly 6.45 Million (yes Million) user passwords that were stolen by a Russian hacker and posted in a forum (where he asked for help in decrypting them) do correspond to LinkedIn accounts. The breach has come on the heels of recent issues with their mobile app. This caused quite a stir and has caused a few people to stop using the mobile app completely.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the web waters… It seems that some enterprising hacking group (as of right now not associated with Anonymous) has decided to break into LinkedIn and grab some passwords. According to reports the data is still in encrypted format, but the group that grabbed them is looking for help decrypting them.