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Comment by runesoerensen | Hacker News Reader

> The number of passwords and the severity of the hack was not uncovered until today. The passwords were stored using unsalted MD5 hashing

Enough said.

> The most popular password pulled from the Last.fm database was 123456. Seriously, it’s 2016 people

Sure, but the breach was in 2012 TechCrunch. Better article: http://www.leakedsource.com/blog/lastfm

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Also the bulk of the users signed before that date. [0] Last.fm is one of my favorite sites. Sad that is dying :(

0. rough heuristic: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=last.fm

Edit: If anyone wants to add me on last.fm here is my profile! http://www.last.fm/user/joer14

You can get even better idea of their site growth (or lack thereof) from the above link (scroll to the bottom of the page) http://www.leakedsource.com/blog/lastfm

Wow! They had some great growth going on and it seemed to hit a wall hard around 2008-2009. Any idea why?

http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

"In all other countries, listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month."

And at the same time they weren't treating us as customers, more like second rate users.

Maybe this is due to Spotify starting to gain traction around that time? https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-08-01%202012...

Soundcloud launched in 2008. Spotify launched in 2008. Only a year or so after Facebook opened signups to anyone IIRC. Not exactly sure what the impact on Last.fm would have been but it evidently wasn't good.

Easy. CBS bought them late 2007. Dev and updates pretty much stopped. They limited tracks you could play directly.

Then they killed radio.

I'm really sad to see it die, it was better at introducing me to new artists than any other service before or since, and the radio was brilliant.

Oh you must have left awhile ago then. I agree they ruined the best music discovery service on the web, but even without it the site was dated but functional.. until last year.

Last year CBS decided the whippersnappers needed a redesign and took out around 80% of the features and put the site into a perpetual beta state.

Could have been worse, they could have hired the guy who redid Flickr and Chowhound.

Didn't really give up until they had the fabulous idea to replace direct streaming with playing poor match Youtube videos as radio. That killed radio finally and made a none functioning joke of the main reason I bought my network music player.

Was mad about that as Last radio was my first choice for work listening.

The site was dated as they were frozen in 2008 - After CBS bought them there was one update very soon after then the site didn't change at all until last year. Minor updates and bug fixes only.

As for the update last year, pretty and vacant, doesn't bring back the things I loved about the site, but lets me see lots of pretty graphs of things I'm not interested in. I took a look at libre fm after that, but that's even more abandoned.

It's tragic how corporate greed can kill such an awesome site. They wasn't even ashamed to ask for money in countries where they didn't had adverts while they were removing the features from its users.

How is Last.fm one of your favorite sites after that horrible redesign that erased tons of user-generated content?

Because it still does exactly what I want it to do, and what I've wanted it to do since I signed up in 2004, which is keep logs of every song that I listen to. The user-generated content side of it was added after I signed up (I think?) so I don't see how I could really miss it.

230K songs since 2004. http://www.last.fm/user/ryxxui

I'm annoyed that I didn't keep using it consistently. I even had it tracking usage from an offline iRiver H340 MP3 player - at the end of the day, I'd upload a database from Rockbox.

http://www.last.fm/user/voltagex

You might be interested in https://libre.fm/ if you aren't confident about the future of Last.fm. It can be used as a drop-in replacement to track your music plays.

173K Songs since Nov 2004. http://www.last.fm/user/GurnB But I took 4 or 5 years off.

I should said "it was" one of my favorite sites. The redesign is awful. They killed the neighbors feature which was really fun.

A blast from the past.

Top email domains :

1. hotmail.com 3. yahoo.com 4. aol.com

49th most used password: Blink182

> Sure, but the breach was in 2012

Even in 2012, storing passwords unsalted (and probably even hashed just once) was considered bad practice. As was MD5.

Bad passwords being bad passwords also goes without saying. 123456 was never a good password.

You don't even need a breach to hack 123456, I expect it to be in every pentester's top20 first-tries (contingent on whatever profile they have on the target, obviously).

> The number of passwords and the severity of the hack was not uncovered until today. The passwords were stored using unsalted MD5 hashing

I'm 100% sure it was known it was MD5 before, and I'm 100% sure I've seen pastebins with lots of successfully bruteforced hashes, because my password was among them.

Example: https://blog.lastpass.com/2012/06/in-case-you-missed-it-chan...

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