Word is out that Living Social recently suffered a huge attack on their customer database, impacting 50 million customers across the globe. On the upside, only customer user names and passwords were compromised, and all credit card and merchant account data is safe.
Of course, with all breaches of this sort, it’s best to go change your Living Social password immediately. In fact Living Social will be sending an email out to all their customers alerting them of the breach and a mandatory password change.
It shouldn’t stop for you there though. You also need to go change your password on all the other sites that you currently use that password. Why? Because the hackers can (and likely will) now take the data they pilfered from Living Social and attempt to use those same login credentials on any other website. Thus, if your login to Living Social and Amazon were identical, these guys can now access your Amazon account too. This is not good…
Going forward it’s always best to use different passwords for different sites, and keep track of them using a secure password management app like 1Password – available for both Macs and iPhones/iPads.
Go change your passwords and be safer this weekend.