Mon Dec 13 2010
The big Gawker break-in included some WELL addresses, paired with Gawker (and related sites) passwords.
This past weekend, the website gawker.com was the victim of a systems break-in. Over 1 million Gawker, Gizmodo, LifeHacker and related sites commenting accounts may have been compromised, with logins, email addresses and passwords grabbed. About 40 well.com email address appeared on the public list of accounts that were compromised.
Since many people use the same password on multiple sites, we have taken the precaution of temporarily disabling those WELL passwords, to prevent malicious access to those accounts here.
If you were locked out for this or other reasons, please generate a new WELL Password.
You may see some phony emails about this, since your email address was made public for all to use. Sadly, it would be trivial for somebody to make such a message look fairly official in a phishing attempt to get you to go to another site that is unsafe. For that reason we are NOT including a clickable link in that informational email.
Since you are reading this in the form of a post on our site, and you navigated here on your own, it's safe to put some links up here. (You may also search for the news yourself instead):
If you need help getting back in, or if you have a phishing attempt with a fake link , you may call us at the number on the footer section of this web page, between 9am and 4:50pm Pacific Time (Monday - Friday).
We apologize for any inconvenience this action may cause, particularly if you have been careful to avoid using your WELL password on other sites. However, we must take overall security seriously, for everyone's safety and privacy.
Take-aways: