The real risk was precisely what happened with LifeHacker–someone got into the website, discover a bunch of users passwords and then use those passwords to get access to their other accounts on the internet. However, the real risk wasn’t that someone would login as me to make comments. I had another for things like email accounts where the risk was moderate and a third for sites like LifeHacker where the damage of someone logging in as me was minimal. I had one for banking and websites where the risk of losing my data was high. Ten years ago I used 3 different passwords. Still it shook me up a bit and made me take a closer look at my password strategy. So I was able to quickly change anything where I might have been at risk. It turns out it wasn’t used in many other places–mainly on things where I needed a quick account and wanted a password that I’d be likely to guess again. Fortunately I’ve been using 1Password so I was quickly able to search through all of my logins and identify where I had previously used that password. I panicked just a bit when I saw my password on the list. Since it was easy to break this password, my username, password and email address was part of the roughly 200,000 released in decrypted form on the web. Since I didn’t consider it a huge security issue I used a simple five letter, single word password. I had an account on Lifehacker from years ago. They also ran some scripts agains the database and were able to find nearly 200,000 people who were using passwords that weren’t very strong. Some hackers got into their system and downloaded their database and source code. Lifehacker is part of the Gawker group of websites. You’ve got to appreciate some of the irony in that title.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |