Hackers Steal 45 Million Passwords From Over 1,100 Websites

Hackers have made off with information, including passwords, from almost 45 million accounts on more than 1,100 major car, sports, and tech community websites, the website LeakedSource revealed in a blog post Tuesday.

The leak affects websites operated by VerticalScope, a Canadian company that runs a large number of online communities, and includes big-name sites like techsupportforum.com and motorcycle.com. According to Leakedsource, the hack was perpetrated in February 2016. LeakedSource has gained notoriety in recent years after hosting data purloined in a number of high-profile hacks, including myspace.com and LinkedIn.com.

If your information has been compromised in the leak you can remove it from LeakedSource’s database via this link. If you have been affected by this hack, change your passwords immediately and be sure you aren’t using the same passwords on other sites and you used on the leaked sites. (Here's a list of other companies whose data has been compromised, and a guide to the steps to take if you think you've been hacked.)

In an email to Vice, VerticalScope VP Jerry Orban confirmed the possibility of a hack and wrote, “We believe that any potential breach is limited to usernames, userids, email addresses, and encrypted passwords of our users.”

However, LeakedSource tells Vice it was able to crack 74% of the stolen passwords. According to the site, the most popular password in use across all 1,100 sites hacked was not “password,” which came in third, but “123456.” The second most-used password was “18atcskd2w," which turned up 91,000 times. (We know, we can't figure it out either.)