So we’ve been hearing a lot hacking news this year and it’s only getting worse.  Large corporations like Sony fell victim to hackers which led to a lot of accounts in the Sony PlayStation Network became compromised.  After that, it’s like everyone is getting hacked from news groups, payment services, law enforcement databases, porn sites, and social networks have been targeted.  The latest one is the Twitter account of former Swedish Democrat and now independent MP William Petzäll.

Petzäll was recently forced into a special care facility as he was deemed to be a threat to himself as well as others.  He is still in the special care facility but yesterday, tweets from his Twitter account stirred trouble as his tweets levied accusations that SD leader Jimmie Åkesson and party secretary Björn Söder hacked into the email accounts of Swedish journalists and their political opponents.

The accusation was followed by tweets publishing email addresses and passwords of the said hacked accounts as proof of his allegations against the two.

Petzäll’s lawyer denied that his client posted those tweets and stated that his client had no internet access to where he was currently at and that an unauthorized person had made those posts, insinuating that his client’s account was also hacked.  Petzäll’s Twitter account had been taken down since the incident.

Over 90,000 usernames and passwords from the popular Swedish blog site Bloggtoppen were exposed to anyone who has Internet access.  Not only that, Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, reported today that 57 other sites were hacked leaving more than 200,000 personal information exposed.  The newspaper also reported that the hacking happened last year and the hackers just decided to make the hacked data public now.

Bloggtoppen is currently down until everything has been ironed out and their security has been reinforced.

Another Swedish newspaper, Expressen, published an in interview they had with hacker sc3a5j, in which the hacker stated that,

“I dumped this information to let people know that they handle their information wrongly. Many web pages are not up to scratch. And consumers need to know they should never use the same [passwords] for different services on the web. This is how we got into Twitter accounts as well.”

The lesson here is that you should not use the same password for all of the sites you log into as this puts you in a position very vulnerable for hacking.  Also, do not use your birthday as a password; it’s like you’re inviting everyone to mess with your account.  Do what the experts say and change your passwords regularly, or at least rotate your passwords or something.

If you’re maintaining too many online accounts and it’s hard to keep track of all your passwords, use password vaults to keep them safe from prying eyes.  Some recommended password vaults are 1Password and KeePass.  Do not be stubborn. Do not wait until you’ve been hacked before taking precaution.