So yesterday, I go online to check out the latest at Lifehacker.com to learn that their database has been hacked and all 1.25 million email accounts have been published on The Pirate Bay.
Gawker Media's first failure was storing the ACTUAL password (most secure sites don't do this).
I found a link to Slate.com to check my email addresses to figure out which had been affected-and found two-the two that I use for mailing lists and 'crap' I don't want in my inbox of 'normal' mail. This is exactly why I have them. They're both Yahoo accounts and used to be my primary email addresses until Yahoo got overrun by SPAM and it became too time consuming to delete the SPAM so I could read the 'regular' email.
So I spent about two hours going through my old/saved email in these two Yahoo accounts and found some stuff that I'd completely forgotten about-old conversations with old friends...pictures I'd recently lost due to a hard drive failure (and back up failure). Mostly good news, some weird stuff, and a few things that I honestly don't remember happening.
The moral of this story: Keep a separate email for your subscription lists and a hard copy of your passwords. They should be unique per site to prevent hacking into your related accounts should your email provider fail you. Yahoo did a pretty good job of catching it and forcing a change to my password-they alerted me well in advance of Gawker. I've also changed the passwords to most of my other subscription sites as a precaution.
While some might say 'it's best to let sleeping dogs lie', some others might remind us that 'sleeping dogs' are the easiest prey.
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