Now that a hobbyist team has uncovered programming errors that make more than 15 million of the Ashley Madison account passwords orders of magnitude faster to crack, it will be only a matter of time before a large percentage of them are available to hackers everywhere. And given how rampant password reuse is, the tsunami-sized torrent is sure to affect accounts all over the Internet.
As Ars chronicled in a 2012 feature headlined Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger, it’s not unusual for Twitter, Amazon, and online services to monitor large leaks and require password changes for affected users.
