Finland Citizens Urged to Change Online Passwords

Date: 2011-11-14 10:46:15

The Finnish NBI (National Bureau of Investigation) is urging all Finns to change all passwords after a major leak this weekend. Over 100,000 email addresses and 15,000 passwords were leaked on Saturday. Officials fear more passwords will be leaked.

According to The Helsingin Sanomat, the Finnish computer publication MikroPC reports that some of the information has leaked from discussion forums operating on a phpBB2 platform.

This highlights an important consideration for users everywhere. Certain platforms are more "vulnerable" to hacking than others. Canned third party web platforms such as PHPBB, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and many more are evolving daily. The teams working on these projects do a great job quickly patching vulnerabilities, but the websites running them must apply the patches on a regular basis, or they are left vulnerable.

Many small niche blogs and websites are run by by small staffs or individuals in their spare time. If one of these sites requires you to register with email and/or password, always use a junk email account and password for registration.

Category: Breach

Subcategory: Passwords