You may have believed that Myspace was a social network from a bygone era, largely harmless and irrelevant. It even gave us some chuckles when internet sleuths found the unfiltered ramblings of Taylor Swift before she became the pop behemoth she is today. But in a bad twist of fate, Myspace was hacked, with hundreds of millions of passwords stolen, and nobody seemed to know about it until last week when the information turned up on LeakedSource, where you can pay for hacked data.
According to Engadget, Myspace’s new owners, Time Inc., found out before Memorial Day weekend that someone was trying to sell user information for accounts that were registered before June 2013. Around that time, Myspace had relaunched and instituted new security protocols, so that the passwords, emails, and user names that were affected came before that crucial date. Myspace has invalidated all of the compromised passwords, but since many people use the same password for everything, those who were affected might want to change passwords on other accounts, especially if you’re one of those smart people who’s using something as easily guessed as “password1”.
The Myspace hack comes to light around the same time as a massive Tumblr hack in a troubling new practice where hackers obtain millions of passwords and other user information en masse and then sit on the information for a long, long time. Tumblr’s hack occurred around the time of its sale to Yahoo! in 2013, and officials are just finding out about it now after the information turned up for sale on various hacker sites.
Let this serious issue serve as yet another alarming reminder to change your password on the regular, and that there is no longer any such thing as privacy on the internet.
(via Engadget)
