A 5-Minute Fix for Your Insecure Passwords

Puzzling hit, but most hacked tied to spammers or dupe accounts

(NEWSER) - The usernames and passwords of more than 55,000 Twitter tweeters were leaked online Monday in a data dump that has puzzled experts. Twitter says that at least 20,000 of the leaked accounts were duplicates, and many more were spam accounts that had already been suspended, InformationWeek reports. Password resets have been sent out to affected accounts, and the possible security breach is being investigated, Twitter says. More»

Cyber-scoundrel also hacks Twitter CEO's Gmail, Paypal accounts

(NEWSER) - A hacker who gained access to a Twitter administrative account two months ago has been sending confidential files to bloggers, InformationWeek reports. Most of the documents sent to blogs such as TechCrunch have been only mildly embarrassing internal correspondence, but some contain security passwords. The hacker, who goes by “Hacker Croll,” says he cracked the Twitter account by guessing the secret question needed for a password reset. More»

State officials increase numbers for recent data breach

(NEWSER) - Almost 800,000 Utah residents—that's one in six people in the state—have been affected by a data breach exposing information including Social Security numbers, names, and dates of birth. Hackers broke into a Utah Department of Health computer server on March 30, and the breach was initially thought to have affected just 24,000 Utahns, but state officials upped that estimate dramatically yesterday, the Salt Lake Tribune reports. More»

Maryland may ban practice

(NEWSER) - Some employers and colleges have found an ingenious way around Facebook's pesky privacy settings: Simply demand that applicants or students friend you, give you a tour of their account, or even divulge their usernames and passwords. MSNBC reports on a number of places instituting the troubling practices:

• At Maryland's Department of Corrections, job applicants are asked to log in to their account and allow an interviewer to watch as they click through their photos and posts. The Department of Corrections used to ask for username and password outright, but stopped after an ACLU complaint last year.
• Colleges are requiring student athletes to "friend" a coach or school official so that their Facebook posts can be monitored. If they refuse, they don't play. "Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings," reads the University of North Carolina handbook.
• Though social media monitoring seems to take place mostly with student athletes, non-athlete college applicants have reported to one lawyer that they were asked for their login information during interviews.

Interpol targets group's Latin American operations

(NEWSER) - Some 25 suspected members of the Anonymous hacking collective have been arrested in Europe and South America, according to Interpol. The international police agency says 250 items of IT equipment were seized in raids in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Spain, the BBC reports. The suspects—including "Pacotron," the alleged chief of Anonymous operations in Spain and Latin America—are accused of planning attacks against targets including Colombia's defense ministry and Chile's national library. More»