16-Dec-2010 19:24

Over a million people told to change passwords...

Over a million people told to change passwords after a huge hack

Millions of people who have Yahoo, Twitter and LinkedIn account holders have been advised to change log-in passwords.

A gossip website ‘Gawker’ was recently hacked and the attack harvested over one million passwords…

The names and their passwords were published on the internet.

Anyone who used the same password for their Gawker account as their other accounts is at risk.

Thousands of Twitter accounts were attacked after the passwords were published & spam adverts were sent promoting ‘diet pills’.

The hack was carried out by a group called ‘Gnosis’.
Interestingly, the ‘hack’ showed that many people use rather guessable passwords.

The three most common passwords were:
123456,
password and
12345678.
Anyone using these is asking for trouble.

Common real-word passwords included "monkey", "qwerty" and "consumer".

Also very popular was ‘lifehack’, which is apparently used by IT geeks to describe a ‘password short cut’.

So what are the safest passwords?

The safest passwords are gibberish… i.e. strings of letters and numbers or two & three words run together with a few numbers thrown in too.

You have been warned.

(From an article by G. Rubin)