Change your passwords now, not later

Gawker Media's have had some well publicised trouble with server security in the past few days. They operate many different blog sites in various different areas of interest which a lot of TJS staff frequent, the technically based ones I might add! Gawker Media have been open and up front about the whole scenario and have requested that all commenters change their password following the hack by a group called "Gnosis", who copied and published sensitive company data, as well as users' account details, releasing them via the always controversial Pirate Bay. The attack appears to have stemmed from an ongoing feud with image board 4Chan and the malicious attack on Gawker's server has lead to the problem of most concern, the release of thousands of user account details. Those account details have subsequently been the target for spam campaigns and other malicious use. The problems caused may not relate to Gawker's sites in particular but the use of the same password across multiple sites. As with other security concerns on high profile sites, the immediate evidence that users aren't that savvy with password security can be seen by the effect it has had on unrelated sites such as Twitter. Not that it needs to be said again but you should never use the same password on multiple sites and whatever you can do to create a strong password and store them sensibly will always help.