I kind of feel like the bearer of bad news after yesterday’s WordPress warning post but these are things photographers need to know about! A few weeks ago it was announced that Adobe was hacked and hackers walked off with millions of user passwords which were then published online. Initial reports put the number of hacked accounts in the few millions but this quickly grew to 38 million.
Now that number is up to 150 million!!
This morning I discovered an article on Petapixel which pointed to a great online tool created by Lastpass which searches the database of publicized information to see whether your account was hacked.
Adobe never sent me ANY kind of notification, but it turns out my account WAS hacked! The fact that I was not notified about this has me fuming. How can a company of Adobe’s size make such a screw-up and then not even have the cojones to admit it to their clients?
At an absolute bare minimum, the simple tool the Lastpass has created should have been put online by Adobe themselves.
IMPORTANT
If you find that your account was hacked then it means that your password is now freely available online. For everyone out there who uses the same password for multiple sites and services, this is a disaster waiting to happen! For example, if your Adobe account has the same e-mail and password as your Facebook account, someone can freely access your data now.
Here’s how to fix this:
Step 1. Hit the big red button below and go to the secure Lastpass web tool to see whether your password was compromised. If it was, log into Adobe.com and reset your password. You might be prompted to reset it as soon as you enter your details.
Step 2. Think long and hard about which other sites and services you might have used the same password with. Gmail, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook….. all of these accounts are now at risk unless you change your passwords. And this time PLEASE use a different password for every site! There are lots of tools out there, like Lastpass, that allow you to safely store all your passwords for reference.
Step 3. Share this post with your friends and colleagues!
