With the advent of a slew of startups and Internet businesses, there has been a huge rise in the amount of data floating on the interwebs. The hacker groups have thus been trying to jump the freight train of data dumps and have been successful in hijacking and leaking the user data of a couple of big hotshot websites.
And with the increased threat of attacks, you shouldn’t be surprised if you receive a notification from your favorite social network -Facebook or online streaming platform – Netflix, to reset your password. These companies have the habit of combing through the leaked data dumps to scour for login credentials that match with your information and then force you to set a new password for your account to prevent future attacks.
Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports that cybercriminals are bound to use the massive number of passwords that leaked online during the recent breach of LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
Netflix has already started mailing its users to force them to change their passwords as they’ve found that certain users have reset their login credientials that were similar to their passwords over at the breached websites.
The mail from Netflix goes something like this, and urges you to click the ‘forgot your email or password’ link to reset your login credentials.
We believe your Netflix account credentials may have been included in a recent release of email addresses and passwords from an older breach at another company.
Just to be safe, we’ve reset your password as a precautionary measure.
And if you’ve been active on the Internet recently, then you must have noticed the notorious acts of OneMine Team who used one such data entry from the LinkedIn password dump, to hack into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s lesser-known social media accounts.
Krebs reinforces the fact that the emails from these service providers are pretty legit and not part of any phishing scam — as users might believe. So, the only one way to ensure that you’re online identity is safe and sound, is to reset your passwords on every platform and try to keep them different from each other, if possible.
