Millions of web users are being asked to reset their passwords as concerns spread over a major hacking attack. Yahoo, Twitter and LinkedIn have asked users to change their details, days after gossip site Gawker was hacked.
Online game World of Warcraft, which has more than 12 million subscribers, has also asked some users to reset their passwords.
Documents show that the most popular password among Gawker users was “123456”, followed by “password” and “12345678”.
Other common terms, used by hundreds of people, included “monkey”, “qwerty” and “consumer”.
Paul Vlissidis, technical director of NGS Secure, part of NCC group commented on the Gawker hack that is causing millions of web users to reset their passwords: “This warning iillustrates why people should not share credentials between websites. If one account gets hacked then the miscreants can get into all of the sites where the same log in information is used. Users must now be more vigilant as most websites use email addresses as usernames.
“This means that if users only have one email address, as most do, and one is hacked, then it is very easy to access the user’s passwords and then trawl all the popular websites to see what they can elicit with the passwords they have stolen.
“This incident serves to highlight the need for users to protect themselves by ensuring that passwords are non-dictionary words – ideally a combination of numbers and letters – and that they are not used across multiple sites, as well as making sure that your computer is running up-to-date anti-virus software.
“At the very least, it’s an identity thief’s dream but, in some cases, if you leave your credit card details on any of these sites you may lose more than just a few personal details.”