Online dating service Cupid Media, which gives you a choice of ethnicity and lifestyles while looking for a mate, suffered a major, major compromise.
An online break-in caused 42 million accounts to be compromised. This compromised included consumer records, password and email addresses. The breach took place way back in January 2013. According to Cupid Media director Andrew Bolton, they have notified those who may have been affected. He said they found the break in and took immediate actions to confront it. It’s also believed the same hacking group that got Cupid Media also got Adobe and PR Newswire, among others.
But there is a lesson to be learned here. Apparently, these hackers knew what passwords to use. Cupid users used passwords ‘123456’ and ‘111111’ over a combined three million times. Letter passwords, ‘iloveyou’, ‘lovely’, ‘qwerty’, ‘mylove’ and ‘iloveu’ were used a combined over 240,000 times. Now that pales in comparison to three million, but keep in mind this is a dating service website. So my conclusion is when you use straight number passwords or passwords retaining to the host website, that makes it easier for hackers to use and abuse. I’m glad many websites make you use a combination of letters and numbers to make you mix it up. That’s what I try to do anyway. And I know it’s hard to do, but try to get a different password for every site, or at least every other site. What tips do you have for password safety?