14 DAY TRIAL // The New York Times is the latest company to advise customers potentially affected by the Gawker accounts database leak to change their passwords.
At the beginning of last week Gawker Media, who owns some of the Web's most popular blogs, including Gizmodo and Lifehacker, announced that unauthorized individuals broke into its servers and stole information.
A group called Gnosis took credit for the attack and, among other data, leaked a database of 1.3 million commenting accounts registered on the Gawker network.
Furthermore, the passwords were encrypted with a relatively insecure algorithm, which allowed hackers to crack most of them.
At least one Twitter mass spam attack was linked to the incident and was the result of people's general tendency to use the same password across websites.
LinkedIn was the first online service to force a password reset for accounts whose email addresses were also found in the leaked Gawker database. Other companies like Yahoo! and Blizzard Entertainment later adopted similar preventive measures.
According to AllThingsD, while not going as far as to force password resets, the New York Times sent out an email yesterday advising potentially affected subscribers to manually change their access codes.
"While there is no evidence of suspicious activity on NYTimes.com we wanted you to know that the e-mail address you registered with NYTimes.com matches an e-mail address that was on the list of Gawker e-mail addresses and passwords that were published online," the company wrote in its notification.
"If you use the same password for NYTimes.com as you did for Gawker, we strongly recommend you change your password," it added.
The email goes on to advise users to create strong password for themselves and links to a NYTimes Blog piece with instructions on how to do that.
While the New York Times' email is certainly welcomed, we can't help but wonder why the company waiting over a week to send out the warning.