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Your old MySpace account might be about to give you some serious grief

Another day, another massive hack

Your old MySpace account might be about to give you some serious grief
03 June 2016

Cast your mind back to 2005. 

José Mourinho was leading Chelsea to the Premier League, UK charts were dominated by Uniting Nations' earworm Out of Touch and absolutely everyone with an internet connection was posting moody poetry and unknown band names on a MySpace page. 

While your old account has probably gathered the digital equivalent to a ton of dust, you might want to see if you can power up your old social hangout - because there's a significant chance it could be in for a right good hacking.

Some 360 million MySpace account details have appeared for sale on the darknet, with 33-gigabytes of passwords, email addresses and user names available to the highest bidder. MySpace's current owner Time Inc. confirmed this week that the details were stolen in a hack that occurred prior to a security overhaul in 2013.

MySpace is currently notifying all users it believes are affected, but as a precaution, it's suspended the passwords of all the old accounts it believes were involved in the hack.

However, the real issue for anyone caught up in the sale of their private details is if they happen to use the same email and password for other existing online accounts. If you're still rocking an ancient '[email protected]' email, coupled with 'Passw0rd' for any of your current internet services, it might be time to consider a change.