One Of The 32 Million With A RockYou Account? You May Want To Change All Your Passwords. Like Now.
It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.
This is no surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with RockYou. These people are as dumb as a box of rocks. That they’ve raised $119 million never ceases to amaze me. Here are just two of my experiences so far.
1. When emailing all developers, instead of using some mailing list software, or hell even BCCing everyone, they simply CC’ed hundreds or maybe thousands of people. On multiple occasions. Despite having promised to fix it after the first.
Once they sent out one that said “Merry Christmas” filling my Inbox with scores of replies, half of which said “Merry Christmas to you too!” and half of which said “take me off of this list.”
2. Negotiating a two-week ad run with us, followed by sending us a contract for x months. When returned, sending us a contract for 2x months. When we decided “what the hell?” and signed it, having run the ad for far longer than 2x months and then sending us a massive bill.
So yeah, this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. RockYou is the short bus of the social games industry. I’m just glad I use Roboform so all any potential hacker got is some random string used only for them. And I’m not worried about someone getting my email address since RockYou already sent that out to everyone.
