Gawker Password Breach - Lessons Learned

I hate to admit it, but I was one of the millions of people whose Gawker profile information was stolen from a cracked server. What this means is that someone has my profile information from Gawker, including my e-mail address and the username and password that I used to authenticate so that I could leave comments on

The problem is that someone else can now try to log into a bunch of other sites using either my e-mail address or Gawker ID and my Gawker password. I wish I could say that my Gawker ID's password was unique, but I created it before I started using Keepass to manage all of my passwords. And to make matters worse, my Gawker password is the one that I used to use on all web sites that didn't contain "sensitive" or financial information.

Here's the good news:

The last point is important. Since almost all of my internet user accounts are stored in Keepass, I used its search feature to look for every account that uses my Gawker password. Within 15 minutes, I had changed my password on all of the sites that had formerly used my Gawker password. At the end of the day, Keepass had saved me a ton of time and ensured that all of my accounts with the "bad" password were accounted for.

So what are my lessons learned?

Whew! Who knew that some day it would be so complicated to use the internet?

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