This weekend, Gawker Media's servers were hacked, leaving many user accounts and their corresponding passwords vulnerable. Nearly 1.25 million accounts, including more than 500,000 user e-mails and more than 185,000 decrypted passwords, ended up being posted online.
I was one of those users. As a result, someone from Los Angeles was able to log into my Facebook account because I'm an idiot who uses the same password for multiple websites. Somehow, Facebook figured out that this chump in L.A. wasn't me and locked down my account.
When I logged onto Facebook yesterday, I received a message saying they had detected suspicious activity on my account. Then I was prompted to identify a series of pictures of my Facebook friends in order to prove it was me. That part was kind of cool, actually.
Anywhore, I went to ALL of the websites I use often: Twitter, Google, Gmail, Facebook, Paypal, etc. and changed all my passwords just in case.
To find out if YOU got Gawkered - go HERE. Plug in an email address (or Gawker user name) to see if your information has been compromised. Here's what it said when I plugged in MY user name ...
Yikes.
The stuff we have to deal with that never even crossed out minds years ago is astounding!
ReplyDeleteYikes! Glad you changed yours before anything worse happened!
ReplyDeleteI didn't put two and two together until now-I had emails in my junk folder from Gawker and didn't recognize the name, so I deleted them-but a few days ago I came home from school, and had a facebook alert saying someone from Kazakhstan tried to access my account from a mobile phone-I immediately changed all passwords to all my accounts from facebook to bank access. Thanks David!!!
ReplyDeleteI changed mine too
ReplyDeletethanks ~ i didn't know about that database checker... mine wasn't compromised (thank god) but even so, when it happened the other day, i changed my gawker p/w along with several others. even if it HAD been, i use different passwords and emails for everything, so it wouldn't have been a biggie... it's a hassle, but worth it when so much of our lives is binary code!
ReplyDelete