In a statement released on Wednesday, popular professional networking site LinkedIn said that new information uncovered by the company suggests that the massive 2012 data breach was much worse than it had thought at that time.

LinkedIn said in the statement that the major data breach which the company suffered in 2012 had apparently affected nearly 100 million users of the social network, which has a total user base of approximately 400 million.

LinkedIn further added that the massive hack compromised not just the passwords of the affected100 million users, but also their email addresses.

Previously, when the data breach hit LinkedIn in 2012, the company had said -- without clarifying the number of users affected by the data breach -- that the hack affected only the passwords of some users. In its response to the data breach, LinkedIn had issued a mandatory password reset for the accounts which it believed had been compromised in the hack.

However, with tech website Motherboard having revealed in a recent report that a hacker - named 'Peace' - claims to posses data for 167 million LinkedIn users and is trying to sell the data on the Dark Web, LinkedIn has now acknowledged that the 2012 hack was much worse than it had realized, and said: "We are taking immediate steps to invalidate the passwords of the accounts impacted, and we will contact those members to reset their passwords."