Hacked

[dejavudew]

So, my hotmail address got hacked. Weeee. Some of you might have gotten email about it. I'm changing passwords "enterprise-wide" now. The sad thing is that I knew about the problem and never really resolved it. I'm also cleaning up my contact lists.

Personally, I blame MySpace.

Some fun facts about this:

• Websites are still stupid about passwords

Comments

[othersider]

That bugs me too. Now, granted, I'd rather be able to type longer passwords, but one benefit I discovered as a result of the different allowed character sets is that I have (sometimes slightly) different passwords at many different places, so if one account were to get hacked, it wouldn't allow the hacker to access accounts I have elsewhere (at least, not immediately...he or she would have to hack those too).

So why do you blame MySpace?

[dejavudew]

It probably wasn't actually MySpace, but I used the same password for MySpace as I did hotmail and I don't trust MySpace to keep that information secure. Truth be told, it was a 6-character, alphanumeric password, so a brute force attack probably wouldn't have taken that long.

According to this (http://www.mandylionlabs.com/documents/BFTCalc.xls), it would take 0 hours to brute force my old password. My new password is very un-brute-forceable. This is what happens when you create a password without knowing anything about security and then using it everywhere like a retarded teenager. :D