SAN FRANCISCO — Although Myspace is merely a shadow of its former self, former users of the once-mighty social networking site should be aware that their old account information may be up for sale online.
According to Time, the data was limited to usernames, passwords and email addresses from the platform prior to June 11, 2013, when the site was relaunched with stronger account security.
"Our information security and privacy teams are doing everything we can to support the Myspace team," Jeff Bairstow, Time Inc. executive vice president and chief financial officer said in a statement.
The breach didn't affect any of Time Inc.’s systems, subscriber information or other media properties, the company said.
Myspace was founded in 2003. It was an extremely popular social networking site but by 2008 had been eclipsed by other sites such as Facebook.
Myspace has invalidated the passwords of all known affected users and will notify them. It is also monitoring for suspicious activity that might occur on Myspace accounts, the company said.
Caches of old passwords and IDs from other online platforms have also appeared for sale recently. Two weeks ago LinkedIn reset passwords for as many as 117 million users whose IDs had been stolen in a 2012 breach after they went up for sale online.
Myspace was one of the world's most popular social networking sites in its heyday, with as many as 75 million users at its peak.
Because of that, many current Internet users at one time might have had accounts on Myspace. The danger to those users is mostly if they have used the same passwords they had on Myspace across multiple accounts.
With big breaches, hackers can create databases of users' emails address and passwords which they can try on different sites to see if they work.
Old Myspace users could also be subject to possible phishing emails. Spammers often use news of big hacks to try to trick the unwary into clicking on dangerous links.