Credit where credit is due:

[theweaselking]

Facebook is doing something very clever. You've all heard about legendarily-incompetent company Adobe's most recent security breach? If not, short version: they lost 150 million sets of user data, poorly encrypted.

Well, what Facebook's done is grabbed the list, and for every email address in Adobe's database that has a Facebook account, they've tried the matching Adobe password against it. And if the passwords match, they've disabled the account and forced a password change. Because even though your Facebook password wasn't compromised, your Adobe password was and *you used the same password in both places*.

This is quite clever. Krebs notes that a couple of other sites are doing the same thing, and, really, more sites should.

Comments

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

For all the legitimate reasons to hate Facebook, their IT infrastructure is very good. Along with things like this, they're developing the Open Compute architecture (open-source alternatives to the sort of high-end network gear that Cisco usually has a near-monopoly on).

If only they would use their powers for good more often.

[skington.livejournal.com]

They're not allowed to. They've gone public.

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Got a similar email from Dreamhost last night.