ClixSense Plain Text Password Dump




Here's a new but makes sense concept that I am not surprised exists. Getting paid to click on internet ads. Company's pay websites to post their ads and then other companies pay people to click on those ads to make it look the website ads are getting traffic. The internet is a big advertising scam, sort of, I am sure the ads to work somewhat., but its kind of like paying for friends, its not real. Anyhoo, The pay to click on ads company ClixSense's user password database was hacked affecting over six million passwords.  It was an easy job because the user  passwords were stored as plaintext in a database, nothing to crack.

A good takeaway from this incident:

Don’t use the same passwords on two different sites. Even if you choose a super-strong password, it only takes one careless site to leak that password in directly usable form.

I would bet we are all guilty of using the same password on multiple websites, I admit I am guilty of that. What's the alternative? where are you going to store a list of  individual strong passwords for each website that is readily available? I guessing an encrypted  document with only one strong password to memorize.