Lulzsec Strikes Again, This Time Posts 62,000 Login Names And Passwords

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If you’ve got a Gmail, Yahoo, or Hotmail email account, you may want to change your password pretty quick here, because the hacking group known as Lulzsec has struck once again. This time, they’ve got a rather strange haul, which they promptly posted online: 62,000 passwords and login names. The weird part is, they’re not exactly sure just what these names and passwords log in to.

The passwords and logins in question were believed to be mostly webmail (the above-mentioned Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail) seized from writing website writerspace.com, apparently owing to slim password security and a series of constantly repeating passwords.

Lulzsec, for its part, encouraged those viewing the database of 62,000 entries to try out said contents on various sites to see if they could actually manage to get in anywhere, and according to reports, said that the contents were “random assortments from a collection”, and they had no idea how many of them still actually worked. Of course, anyone actually trying out said logins would be risking some jail time, so I don’t recommend you take Lulzsec’s advice here, which is probably a pretty good general course of action to begin with.

Though according to reports, some have already been victimized as a result of this, including one woman who spent a morning trying to get a credit card charge for the iPhone reversed through Amazon, and somewhere, a level 85 human warrior on the Mal’ganis server of World of Warcraft was abducted.

Apparently, the major problem was that many folks were using the same passwords for a variety of different sites, which means when one went down, the rest were taken by default. This is a pretty substantial no-no in terms of web security, so you may want to go changing passwords, especially if your email address happens to appear on the list in question.

Are you reusing passwords even though you know you shouldn’t? Or do you have a good variety of passwords in place? We’re talking web security right now, so head on down into the comments section below and share your thoughts!