“The SQL dump contained screen names, email addresses, and hashed passwords for account login on the Advice site. Once we learned.

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Over time a baseline average of 150,000- 300,000 passwords dumped each month might emerge, but this numberwould skyrocket every time a large site was affected by a securitybreach. In June of 2012 we watched LinkedIn lose 6.5 millionpasswords and eHarmony lose around 1.5 million.

The next month450,000 passwords were leaked from Yahoo Voices. Just this pastFriday Twitter announced a forced password change for around 250,000users whose password hashes may have been accessed by hackers(although these have yet to be publicly dumped). At least some users of the hacked sitesare likely to experience problems as a result of these passworddumps.

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If passwords were stored in a plaintext format then anyaccount is vulnerable to misuse by unauthorized individuals. Even ifhashed, password cracking software can produce the plaintextpasswords fairly quickly for all but the stronger passwords. Whetherhackers care to use these stolen credentials will depend partially onwhat the account can be used for and partially on how motivated theyare to annoy users.