The website Cupid Media was hacked and the attackers retrieved the personal details and plain text passwords of 42 million consumers. The data included the names, email addresses, unencrypted passwords and birthdays.

The website Cupid Media was hacked and the attackers retrieved the personal details and plain text passwords of 42 million consumers. The data included the names, email addresses, unencrypted passwords and birthdays.

“In January we detected suspicious activity on our network and based upon the information that we had available at the time, we took what we believed to be appropriate actions to notify affected customers and reset passwords for a particular group of user accounts,” Bolton, Cupid Media’s managing director,said. “We are currently in the process of double-checking that all affected accounts have had their passwords reset and have received an email notification.”

"Subsequently to the events of January we hired external consultants and implemented a range of security improvements which include hashing and salting of our passwords. We have also implemented the need for consumers to use stronger passwords and made various other improvements."

31 million Cupid Media users registered with either Yahoo!, Hotmail or a Gmail address. And what security did they take? 1.9 million used "123456", 1.2 million picked "111111" and 91,000 selected "iloveyou." The danger being that it is likely that they used the same password on other sites.