On Monday, the independent cyber security researcher Leigh-Anne Galloway reported that she discovered a critical security flaw in MySpace’s platform that allowed anyone with easily attainable data to get access to old accounts. All you need is a name, a username, or a birthday.
The online community had flashbacks of this time of the year around a year ago when it was also announced that a massive security breach compromised millions of MySpace accounts and passwords were published for everyone to see.
MySpace developers did not respond to Galloway when she initially reported the flaw last April, but promptly took measures to cover the hole in their walls after the media got word of the sloppy security plaguing the once-popular social hub.
How to access anyone’s old MySpace account
As described by Galloway in her post, all it takes is a couple of steps to find out that MySpace’s security protocols are virtually non-existent, and that anyone that so desires can break into old accounts if they dedicate a while to mining some widely available information.
First up, the platform offered users an account recovery form in the case they did not remember their old login information. Due to the 2016 massive breach, the admins of the website had also disabled all passwords before 2013.
Users today, then, faced themselves with a rather simple tool to recover their account and go back online to MySpace. The site prompted them to fill out as much information as possible, in hopes of reestablishing the service as best as they can, but only a couple of fields of the form needed to be filled.
In short, all you need is a name, a username, and a birth date, being this last one the hardest to obtain. Considering the username is in the URL of your MySpace profile and your name is displayed on your home page, it is remarkably simple to breach old accounts.
Why and how to delete your MySpace account
If you forgot about your old account and trust the internet to not get you hacked in your new accounts on other social media sites with that information, think twice. You might have forgotten, but some of your personal info, interests, and tastes that now may have influenced current passwords are still up on MySpace.
Luckily, deleting your account is as simple as following the breach procedure to get control over your old account back, then log into account settings, and select the option to delete your account at the bottom of the page.
MySpace personnel has shown it is not the most updated in terms of security, so you might want to consider removing yourself from their platform altogether. The site nowadays is a social hub for music lovers, but it offers nothing you cannot get at other sites with more traffic and safety.
Source: Leigh-Anne Galloway
