10Million Website Accounts Breached
A website that helps drivers avoid speeding tickets is warning its 10 million registered users that their email addresses and passwords may be in the hands of hackers who breached the site’s security.
The advisory was issued on Thursday by Trapster, which boasts more than 10 million users on its front page. The site uses crowd-sourcing techniques to compile locations of police who are using radar to catch speeding drivers.
Trapster said the hack amounted to a “single event,” and that the company has since taken steps to “prevent this type of attack from happening again, and continue to implement additional security measures to further protect your data.” Trapster didn’t say whether it planned to begin hashing passwords, which is considered a basic security precaution to prevent their disclosure.
Trapster’s gaffe comes a little more than a month after hackers rooted Gawker Media servers and made off with some 1.5 million user passwords and corresponding email addresses. After a file containing the booty was posted online, many users of Twitter, Facebook, and other popular websites reported a spike in account breaches, indicating the sad fact that some folks can’t be bothered to use a unique password for different sites.
This fact hasn’t been lost on the security team at Twitter, which warned Trapster users to change their passwords shortly after Thursday’s advisory was released.