Time Warner Cable and Linode Hacked, Reset Your Passwords Now

Time Warner Cable, the second largest cable company in the United States has warned that login credentials for 320,000 customers have been stolen. The cable giant told Reuters that email and passwords were likely gathered through malware downloaded via phishing attacks or through data breaches other companies suffered who stored Time Warner Cable customer information. The company is currently investigating how the data was obtained, however no signs that the company was breached have been discovered.

A Time Warner spokesperson said that the company issued the warning after receiving information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warning that customer emails and passwords “may have been compromised.” As a precaution, Time Warner Cable is sending emails and postal mail advising all affected customers to update their passwords immediately.

The latest Time Warner Cable hack or spill of information comes just days after the cloud hosting provider Linode forced users to reset their passwords following signs of a breach. Linode’s abrupt password reset came after an investigation revealed “the unauthorized login of three accounts [that] has led us to the discovery of two Linode.com user credentials on an external machine. This implies user credentials could have been read from our database, either offline or on, at some point.” The stolen database contains email addresses, usernames, “securely hashed” passwords and encrypted two-factor authentication seeds.

The Linode breach comes just days after the company suffered relentless DDoS attacks over the winter break.

If you have an account at either Time Warner Cable or Linode we recommend you update your password immediately, and if you used that password to secure other accounts on the web you should change those passwords as well.

[Photo via Ildar Sagdejev/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)]