Hackers leak mail details of UK defence workers
THE e-mail account details of British government officials, civil servants and defence company staff have been leaked after computer hackers attacked a prominent group of gossip and news websites.
The work e-mail addresses and passwords of senior staff at the Crown Prosecution Service, officials at the Charity Commission and employees of BAE Systems are among those in a file of more than one million user names that is circulating online, putting highly sensitive correspondence at risk.
The leaked details belong to people who used their work e-mail to access websites run by the Gawker Media group, founded by Nick Denton. These include the gossip and celebrity websites Gawker and Jezebel and the popular gadget site Gizmodo. Although the passwords were published in an encrypted form, they were so easy to guess that a computer program was able to crack them within minutes or even seconds.
