Interesting news about Gawker and passwords. For those that don’t know, Gawker is a news aggregation site and seems to have been subject to some sort of attack recently whereby its entire password database seems to have been compromised. The impact of this is that lots of Twitter accounts have been hacked.

Two things are of interest here:

1. The types of user on the site are quite technically savvy, and yet still have very poor passwords

2. People are still using the same password on different sites

If you take anything away from this, please seriously consider using different passwords on different sites as if one gets hacked another becomes vulnerable. Password vaults are potential solutions to this problem, like LastPass or 1Password (recommendations from Graham Cluley of Sophos).