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LinkedIn says it will e-mail affected users and invalidate the compromised passwords. But, security experts say there are ways to check for yourself if your password was on the list.The process involves downloading the dataset of leaked passwords, converting your password into the encrypted format in which the passwords are displayed, and searching for the password in the dataset.  

All of the leaked passwords are hashed, or encrypted using SHA-1, which converts the characters that make up the password into a 40-character hash. To find the hash that’s connected to your password, there are a variety of free SHA-1 conversion tools, including from websites such as ; and .

Some experts warn about using such online conversion tools, however. Dave Pack is a director at LogRhythm, a log management and IT security firm, who says some of the online conversion websites hold logs of hashes that have been calculated, so he warns about using such tools if your LinkedIn password is also used as a credential for other websites.

Another way to create a hash and avoid using a conversion tool is to use a command line transcript that creates the hashtag automatically and searches for it directly in the datadump. Those command line transcripts are specific to individual operating systems.