A group of hackers has struck at multiple websites, stealing the personal data of over 45 million people. While over 1,000 websites have been compromised in this hacking spree, common targets include car, sports, and tech sites, and all of them were run on a VerticalScope platform.

VerticalScope Inc., a Canadian company that owns and operates online communities and content portals, was breached some time back in February 2016. The hackers responsible are unknown, as are the methods used, but LeakedSource believes that the breach is so large due to VerticalScope storing all of the data on interconnected servers, or even the same server.

The stolen information includes email addresses, usernames, IP addresses, and one or more passwords per person, and was taken from over 1100 websites. VerticalScope believes that the breach is limited to that information, so no financial information was lost, nor was any personal information that could be used for a data breach.

However, Motherboard reports that about 74 percent of the stolen passwords are easy to crack, due to the weak MD5 algorithm’s use in hashing and encoding them. As always, investigation of the stolen passwords reveals a shockingly high usage of weak and easily guessed passwords, including the ever-popular “123456,” “password,” and “qwerty.”

If your password was compromised in this breach (or if you use any of those weak passwords on any site at all) you should change your password immediately. As with any data breach, be sure to change any identical or similar passwords used on any other site, as repeating a password means that once one is stolen, all of them are.

VerticalScope has responded to the incident, and is currently investigating and gathering data for law enforcement. The company is reviewing its security policies and putting security changes into play, particularly regarding password strength and expiration policies, although as its poor processes and protection did make it easier for the hackers to steal as much information as they did, it’s a lesson learned all too late.

Image by Sir Mildred Pierce