Today we bring you news of a breach which is so massive in size, it is quite probably, the largest breach in history.
This particular breach is from MySpace, and the number of passwords claimed to be included is an eye-popping 427 million.
Passwords are easy to steal if they’re weak to begin with!
Once again, the passwords allegedly exposed in this breach were simple, unsalted SHA-1 hashes, vulnerable to just the same sort of high-speed try ’em all attack as in the LinkedIn breach of 2012.
According to Leaked Source, lots of passwords have already been cracked, with the top 50 choices so far accounting for more than 6 million passwords, or 1.5% of the total.
Interestingly, password1, abc123 and the entirely-expected 123456 come in second, third and fourth respectively.
Top place is the unusual (but nevertheless easily-cracked) password homelesspa, attached to more than 850,000 accounts that Leaked Source suggests were created by some sort of automated process, presumably orchestrated by a gang of scammers to use for nefarious purposes.
What we recommed: if you have EVER had a myspace account, and if you have ever used the myspace password on any other account – we recommend you change it now. If you re-use that password all the time – get as password manager, and get busy – start changing your password NOW! This myspace breach may cause you headaches unless you start changing passwords immediately…