A hack of Gawker by a group calling itself Gnosis that revealed thousands of user account details and passwords has prompted millions to change their account details on sites as big as Yahoo, Twitter and LinkedIn.Gawker, which hosts many prominent blogging and news sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker, was hacked by the group who posted this on the prominent blog: “Your servers, Your database’s, Online accounts and source code have all been ripped to shreds!”
The post continues, “You wanted attention, well guess what, You’ve got it now!”
The hack revealed the dangerous simplicity of user passwords, with some of the most popular passwords being “qwerty” and “123456.”
A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US revealed that the security issue of simple passwords has plagued Internet users since the ’70s, where a study of Unix passwords from 1979 revealed that around 30 percent of user passwords were simple four letter words.
Gawker currently is still holding a notice on their website to remind all users to change their passwords.
