Okay, okay, we know what you’re thinking: “Myspace?” you scoff, “It’s 2016! I haven’t had a Myspace account since I was a kid! My gosh, what’s next, CompuServe?”
And, yes, we get it — MySpace isn’t exactly the new hotness these days. It’s barely even the old hotness. It’s more like an old, forgotten sock in the laundry room. But the leak, reported by Motherboard, of 427,484,128 passwords is still a big honking deal.
For one thing, although Myspace is the punchline of any internet joke, it still boasts 50 million unique users per month — not a number that holds a candle to Facebook’s 1.6 billion, granted, but still no small feat.
But there’s an even bigger reason, aside from those 50 million loyal users, that this is a problem: because we, as a cultural beast, kind of completely suck at password management practices. We reuse them, even when we know we’re not supposed to. We use bad ones, even when we know we ought not. We — especially if we are teenagers or young adults signing up for an early social network — follow predictable patterns.
So maybe, in the year of our Facebook two thousand sixteen, you don’t care what someone does with your old Myspace account. But the 360 million e-mail address/password combos in the leaked data are certain to yield at least a few active, useful combinations that work on other sites.
As Motherboard also points out, if the numbers pan out then this would be one of the largest password heists ever on record… and somehow, over the course of nearly 13 years of continuous Myspace operation, has never once been mentioned before. That means one of two things: either Myspace never figured out they were being hacked, or did, and chose not to disclose it ever. Both options are awful for users of the site.
Also, in case you are curious, many of the passwords in the database are, indeed, terrible. “password1” ranks right near the top, as do “abc123,” “123456,” and “myspace 1.” Perhaps also reflecting the site’s demographic base, “f*ckyou1” and “iloveyou1” also both appear more than 120,000 times.
Hackers Claim to Have a Stunning 427 Million Myspace Passwords [Vice Motherboard]
by Kate Cox via Consumerist