Recently, the Gawker family of web sites suffered a data breach where millions of password records were stolen and many of the passwords were cracked and published. This incident revealed, once again, that many people are using very weak passwords, but this article also discusses other important lessons.
A key lesson from the attack is that any large password collector must have a plan for responding to a compromised password file — Gawker’s technical inability to force password updates or even email their users is inexcusable. Still, these measures can’t contain the damage. The biggest missed angle on this story is that it’s not just a Gawker hack, accounts on thousands of websites can be compromised as many users use the same email/password combination everywhere.