A Leaked source reporter stated that a massive breach occurred on the Last.fm music website in March of 2012. Last.fm released a statement about its security about three months after the breach occurred. The statement showed great concern for site users.
Last.Fm officials urged their users to change their passwords immediately. They felt that such an action was necessary given all the recent reports about password breaches on other sites. It seems as if password hacking has become out hand lately.
No no one knew the exact number of passwords that were hacked or how severe the hack was until today. The site used the MD5 hashing method of encryption to store the passwords rather than the plaintext style. Just about all sites that store people's passwords use some type of encryption to do so. The problem is that some methods are much safer than other methods are.
MD5 just doesn't work anymore. It is weak because it has no defense against modern methods of aggressive password hacking. MD5 doesn't use the salting process either, which is another strike against it. Lack of salting was probably what cause the Last.Fm breach.
Anyone who has a Last.Fm account should change his or her password. We are warning you out of concern. Simple passwords like 123456 just will not fly in 2016 if you want to protect your account. Take five minutes and do the password change. A tool like LastPass can help you generate a password if you're having problems doing so.
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