Security Alert

[mmaestro]

Folks, if you've been wondering what on Earth has been going on with the recent Livejournal site changes and other similarly haphazard and totally unexplained changes, it seems that a hacker group has been harvesting passwords from the site. They claim to have over 5,000, with cookies from over 900,000 accounts that could possibly be used to harvest more passwords. What you need to do is:

• Change your password. Now. Here.
• Delete all the cookies from your cache. This is under Tools/Internet Options in Internet Explorer, and Tools/Options in Firefox. Other browsers, you'll have to look yourself.
• And finally, most importantly, if you share a password between Livejournal and another site, especially ones you can order things from like Amazon that also use your E-mail address for your login, or just your E-mail account then
  1. You're an idiot.
  2. You should go change those passwords right now.

OK, that's that. Secure your account, and then start composing an E-mail of very, very harsh words towards Livejournal and the people who run it (Six Apart) who seem to have even less concern for privacy and security than those who previously ran the site.

For more, see this post or this article from the Washington Post.