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Comment by palish | Hacker News Reader

These kids seriously need to be punched in the face. "For the lulz," as it were. Or perhaps "for great justice" would be more fitting.

Is there any way we can help these 62,000 people? I'm reading through the password list now, and many of these passwords are to people's gmail accounts. I see a comcast account too ... you could probably access billing info just with that password alone.

It feels like our duty, somehow, as good internet citizens, to help these people out. Many of them are probably mom'n'dad-types ... they have no idea what a "Database" is, let alone what it means for one to be leaked.

But we can't just go and change their passwords, even if it's for their protection, since it's the password to their email account and we have no way of notifying them.

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Parse & collect email accounts, send emails (in serial) and weep as it gets gobbled up by gmail's spam detection.

A more realistic alternative might be to notify Google with a machine-readable list of email addresses the passwords for which have been compromised so they can do a system notification of these users without fear of getting eaten by spam filter.

It's done. Redditters took care of that.

Im already on it, at least for domains that I am a part of or know people in

This is nothing. Remember the pastebin submission earlier this month? I wrote my own little pastebin scraper, and within 20 minutes saw at least three compromised Facebook accounts - one was a keylogger that was watching as someone was reactivating their account because it was shut down for suspicious activity.

I really thought about sending them an e-mail, but then I'd be an easy target to blame.

We can help by getting them to have different passwords for different services. We can help them by forcing companies to make security a priority.

As a good internet citizen you should be more worried about the companies that you have accounts with and getting them to improve their security before this kind of thing happens to you.

I wonder how well it would go over if every time you signed up for a service, that service would try to log into the e-mail account you provided with the password you provided - and refused to create your account if it succeeded.

That... is an awesome idea.

If you blog about it and submit it, I'll upvote it.

I guess it's time to start me a blog. I'll see if I can get it done this evening.

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