There’s a lot of buzz around the Gawker Media leak of 1.3 million user accounts. If you use Passpack, you’re probably safe since you likely have unique passwords for every site.
From the the notice Gawker sent out (my emphasis):
This is what you should do immediately: Try to change your password in the Gawker Media Commenting System. If you used your Gawker Media password on any other web site, you should change the password on those sites as well, particularly if you used the same username or email with that site.
3 Quick Steps to Double Check
Here’s a quick way to double check your Passpack account, and make sure that your Gawker media password is not reused elsewhere.
- In your account, search for the names of any of the Gawker sites that you might have created an account and password for. Those are:
- Lifehacker
- Gizmodo
- Gawker
- Jezebel
- io9
- Jalopnik
- Kotaku
- Deadspin
- Fleshbot
- Once you find an entry for one of these sites, copy the password.
- Paste the password into the search box now.
If no results are found: congrats! You’ve never reused the password and no other accounts are at risk. If you DO get a result, go change that password at the website, and make sure to record the new one in your Passpack entry.
Rinse and repeat for each one of the Gawker websites listed above.
If your business relies on protecting the access to your online accounts (and even “just” protecting your commenting cred accross the web), we highly recommend you take a moment to also do a more systematic check for weak passwords and change them.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Reuse Passwords
Remind your friends and coworkers to choose and use a password manager (I don’t care if it’s Passpack or not – just get them set up and safe for goodness sake!).
Know a business owner who needs some guidance in getting set up? Send them a note and attach Passpack’s PDF Getting Started Guide.
They’ll thank you for it. Really, they will.
3 Comments
I received some spam from a friend immediately following this fiasco . . . needless to say, matching e-mail/passwords across sites was the culprit. The natural conversation following was my practice of not recycling passwords, what I use to facilitate the generation and preservation of these passwords.
This situation must be good for you online Password manager companies! It certainly makes me appreciate my situation.
It’s not clear where the best place to leave this bug report is, so I decided to leave it here on the latest blog post.
Step 1) In iOS, “Add to homescreen” the link to m.passpack.com
Step 2) Open passpack from the icon created on the homescreen from step 1
Step 3) Log in to passpack normally.
Step 4) Choose any password entry and click to view.
Result: Passpack will try to open a new window in Safari, for which you will be again prompted to log in. This means that Passpack does not currently play well with “Add to homescreen”. This is very inconvenient for users that want quick access to Passpack like a native iOS app.
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