Does Your LinkedIn Profile Hold The Key To Your Password?

This article describes a proof-of-concept by researcher Itzik Kotler who used a dataflow language called Pythonect to scrape public LinkedIn profiles (via Google Custom Search and hCard) and generate likely password candidates from publicly available fields (name, company, birthdate). Kotler reports small-scale testing, discusses practicality and scaling challenges, and notes that disabling public profiles mitigates the specific crawling method.