Am I just too paranoid?

[doingsoso]

Does anyone have any birdies whispering in their ear about what precautions LiveJournal is planning on putting in place to prevent Journal hacks like the most recent ones? I don't use a Hotmail account, but you can bet they'll crack gmail addresses too. Sigh. And I did the secret question thingy, but they must have some way to prevent that sort of

Comments

[worldserpent]

I have no idea, but if you have any reason to suspect anything has been compromised, I would get the LJ archive program and back up your journal.

[doingsoso]

I have my journal backed up and archived, and I also have a backup journal. But I would still like Live Journal to make a statement about this, and tell us exactly how it happened and how they plan to prevent it in future, or at least make it much more difficult. This is the first time I've heard of simultaneous accounts being hacked on LJ.

[worldserpent]

How were the accounts hacked? If what happened was that the email account was taken over, and then the hackers used the email account to get into the LJ account, I don't know if there really is anything LJ can do about it? Because technically, if this was the situation LJ itself was not hacked, so there is nothing to distinguish what happened from normal use, IIRC.

[lied_ohne_worte]

According to the rumours I heard (and I think at least one of the "hacked" people posted about it), it was the email accounts, yes. Not really something LJ can prevent.

And if LJ was to make a large "Look, people, if someone accesses/re-registers your email account, they can get into your LJ account, too!" post, it might actually encourage people to try doing this with other accounts.

[andy]

If you're concerned about your first email address security, I suggest that you contact the Abuse Team, as they may (or they may not) be able to assist.

[andy]

What might they be able to do?

[doingsoso]

No, I didn't use a hotmail address. But i don't know what Abus could do about it.

There has to be a weakness in the security for people to hack in. So I'm wondering how they're going to address that issue, or if they'll even bother. Though I never knew about the security question situation until now.

[andy]

Security question will not help if one's first email is hijacked -- this feature is designated specifically for the cases when one forgets password for own account and loses access to all of their emails.

[surprisesex]

Probably nothing, considering this exact attack has been used for at least 4 years and I'm sure longer than that.

I archive everything.