Do you use Boxee? Your log-in credentials may be compromised

Boxee service has suffered a compromise.

Apparently, 158,000+ individual users accounts have been compromised.

If you are user of the Boxee TV service, adjust your log-in credentials NOW.

More importantly, if you reused the same or similar userid and password combination for your Boxee account with another online account, you should change the password on ALL your other accounts as well. We have long advocated the use of one password for one account as the standard password practice.

Why Boxee has opted to be silent on the breach is puzzling, neither Boxee or their parent company Samsung have provided any data points surrounding the compromise of the 158,000+ accounts, nor have they provided notification to those compromised. For this reason, we advise all Boxee users adjust their log-in credentials as detailed above.

What to do?

How do you create strong passwords, here are a few password generators I have used:
Secure Password Generator from PC Tools
Password Generator Tool (available for download) from Source Forge
Ultra High Security Passwords from GRC the perfect password

Alternatively, you may wish to use a password management system, our parent entity, Prevendra, has an affiliated marketing relationship with one of the best, RoboForm.

What happened?

While details are thin, given Samsung/Boxee silence, according to ARS Technica, a website catering to the “alpha geeks”, the group that hacked into the Boxee back-end infrastructure of the Boxee forums, posted on a hacker forum a file containing the – names, email addresses, birth dates, message histories, and partially protected log-in credentials for the 158,000+ Boxee forum subscribers. The article continues how LastPass (a password management system) began warning customers whose email addresses were contained in the massive MySQL file posted by the hacker(s) in late-March 2014.

While you may not be able to affect whether an entity providing services to you is compromised, you can limit the compromise to that specific entity by practicing good cyber hygiene: one account – one password.