Greg's Corner

The MySpace hack could cost you

Do you remember MySpace? You know, the sparkly animated background plagued social network of the mid 2000s. Admit it, you had one but you abandoned it after the advent of Facebook. Recently it was made public that the former king of the social networking world had been hacked and hundreds of millions of usernames, email addresses and passwords have been compromised.

So what does this mean to you? Well, that depends. Are you still using the same password that you were using with MySpace? If you use the same password on multiple websites or apps you are in danger of having all your information compromised. Internet security experts often say that you should use different passwords for all your different accounts and to aid in doing so you should use a password manager like Lastpass or KeePass to keep them all straight and passwords should be changed routinely.

Even if you’ve abandoned your MySpace account and haven’t logged into it in years there still could be personal information attached to the account that could potentially lead to identity theft. If you no longer use a service you’re better off deleting the account than letting it sit out there as a potential target for identity thieves.