If you have teenagers or know what they’re up to these days, you may have heard of an image-sharing site called We Heart It. It’s been around for a few years, and only recently it announced a data breach that occurred “a few years ago” and affected accounts that were created between 2008 and 2013. According to Tech Crunch, as of a few years ago, over 40 million teens used the site and a big chunk of them had their information accessed by the unauthorized party.
Even though the passwords were encrypted, We Heart It was using older technology and noted that those passwords are not secure. Therefore, anyone using that site should change passwords now. It’s recommended you do so even if you created an account outside the date range they provided. This is because often times, a company will announce a breach based on initial analysis and find out later that more users were affected. This happened with Yahoo as well as with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) several years ago. The initial figures increased significantly as more information was discovered through additional investigation.
When creating passwords, be sure to use the maximum number of characters allowed and include upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers and special characters. Those can typically include any of those above the numbers on the keyboard as well as the tilde (~), the accent mark ( ` ), the pipe (|), brackets (< > [ ] ), braces ({ }), and others.
Don’t use the same password for more than one site. Password reuse is a real threat and has caught out many unsuspecting users. Remember that if you used the same password on other sites as on We Heart It, change those too.
The company is sending out messages to those it believes were affected, but don’t wait for that notification. Just change passwords anyway. They are also transitioning to stronger and more updated encryption.
As of January 2014, Alexa reported that roughly 80% of users of We Heart It were under the age of 24.
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