Over a million users of the Spotify music service are being warned that they may have to change their passwords after it was announced that information about members could have been stolen by hackers.
According to a statement by the firm, which offers online music streaming, information such as email addresses, passwords, dates of birth, genders, postcodes and billing receipt details have been potentially exposed.
Spotify are keen to stress that credit card details are not at risk, and that the information that may have been exposed because of a bug in their systems was the password's hash value rather than the password itself.
However, hackers who had grabbed the hash values, and reverse-engineered Spotify's protocol, would be able to feed words from a dictionary database through the hashing algorithm until a match was found.
The only silver lining on this cloud is, as The Guardian explains, that the problem should only affect users who signed up before December 19th 2008 and most of Spotify's growth has actually been since then.
Obviously it would be wise to follow Spotify's advice and change your password on the system. Furthermore, you should make sure that you are not using the same password on any other website.
That's the real story here. As I recently explained, too many people use the same password on every website they access. If just one website has a security blunder, all of your online information may be at risk.
