Apr 3, 2014 // Andrew Stroup
Ars Technica is reporting that the personal details of over 158,000 Boxee TV users have been leaked over the past week. Boxee, which was bought by tech giant Samsung for $30 million last year, is a web-based television service similar to Apple TV or Amazon Fire. It enables its users to view, rate, and recommend content to their friends through various social networks and interactive media channels.The breach occurred late last week and included user info such as IP addresses, passwords, and message archives–all of which was available online shortly after the hack.
While the data stolen from Boxee appears to only cover online forum accounts, not service accounts, the high likelihood that users may have re-used the same password for both accounts is cause for concern. The issue is that hackers could use this data to gain access to both accounts and remove them from the user’s control before they learn that there has been a breach at all. As a rule of thumb, it’s always better to use a unique password for each account you have, and to never recycle passwords. If you’re having trouble thinking of new passwords for your accounts, CommonKey has made a free password generation service available for anyone to use.
