While it’s not new news by now, a couple of days ago it was publicly announced that 1.3 million Gawker accounts had been compromised by a group of hackers tired of the company’s bravado about security and other organizations. While announced over the weekend, initial signs of the hack were noted by Gawker’s team a month before, although they didn’t piece it together at the time. While Gawker had encrypted password, those who weren’t that secure were decrypted by the hacker group, just to prove how easy it was to reveal password (and in the process noting that 2000 Gawker users used the word password).
I was on the list, with my E-mail address and password revealed for all to see. That doesn’t scare me, as I have long had various passwords for certain sites. Unlike Nick Denton and others, I don’t use the same password for my “low security” sites, places where I do thinks like leave comments or use it sparingly, vs. “high security” sites, such as banks and social networks.
It did, however, make me think, as the “low security” password is one I did use for awhile, when I was more naive, on a wider variety of sites. I spent time last night painstakingly resetting passwords to services I use often, like last.fm, down to ones I’ve used maybe twice in my life. Google played a role in helping me seek sites where I used a specific username, and I’m sure I’ve missed others.
It’s a good security lesson, even if it’s a hassle: don’t use the same password for everything. Otherwise, you’ll find someone spamming your Twitter friends about acai berries.
If you want to know if your password has been compromised, There are tools out there that can tell you.
SOURCES: The Next Web, Lifehacker, Forbes
