If you have ever had an account – even just to leave comments to articles and posts – on Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Kotaku, Deadspin, Fleshbot or Jalopnik, then you are in for a nasty surprise. Odds are good that your account has been compromised, and your user name and password posted on the Internet, as the result of security breach of Gawker Media’s servers that happened over the weekend. Gawker media does get points for alerting all of their users as soon as they discovered the breach (about 10 minutes ago as of the time of this posting on 6:20 p.m. PST on Monday, December 13th, 2010).

Just this past week we told you about a vulnerability that all jailbreaked iPhones are at risk for, due to there being a default root password for SSH that most people who jailbreak their iPhones don’t (know to) change. Now, taking advantage of that same ‘default root password’ issue, countless jailbroke iPhone owners are finding Rick Astley’s mug on their iPhone, as jailbroken iPhones get “rickrolled” by the Ikee worm. (A “rickroll” (“rick roll”) is a fad that started a couple of years ago when, inexplicably, the video of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” became the visual punchline to tricks played across the Internet, with links to supposedly topical content actually taking the user to the Astley video. To get so tricked is to get “rick rolled”.)

A Dutch hacker has demonstrated that jailbreaking your iPhone opens it up to a hack that allows your jailbroken iPhone to be easily accessed and remotely controlled. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t jail break your iPhone (or that you should, we pass no judgement on the act of jailbreaking an iPhone), but it does mean that if you are going to jailbreak your iPhone, you need to know how to close the security hole you will create (or already have created) by jailbreaking your iPhone.

It has all the makings of a classic western: trouble brewing between two factions in Arizona over disputed territory, the law unable to head the confrontation off, people taking matters into their own hands, and it all culiminating in the inevitable showdown. Only in this case, the dispute is over computer territory, one of the factions is the law, and the other side is the county itself!

If you use Gmail, and also use Facebook, it can be very easy for someone to password crack and access your Gmail account using Gmail’s recover password retrieval feature. This is because Gmail’s access password recovery feature allows anybody to guess the answer to your “forgot password” reset security question. And if the answer to your forgotten password reset security question happens to be information easily gleaned from your Facebook account (or some other social network information), then password hacking your Gmail account is as easy as typing in that password protection answer. (And we use the term “password protection” loosely.)

Montana, once known as “Big Sky” state, just became the “Big Spy” state, with the revelation that those applying for jobs with Monatana’s City of Bozeman are required to provide their username and password for any social networking site to which they belong, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, and others.

Starting tomorrow, January 1, 2009, sex offenders in Georgia will be required by law to provide the state with all of their Internet usernames, email addresses, screen names, and passwords. Georgia joins Utah in this requirement.

If you retrieve your email via POP from Gmail, you may on occasion find that Gmail completely rejects your password. Now, having Gmail rejecting your POP password can be very disconcerting, not to mention frustrating! Your mail client keeps prompting you for your Gmail password, you keep entering the password that you know is the right password, and Gmail keeps rejecting it. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

Archiveus is the newest of a string of Trojans being dubbed “ransomware” because they lock and hold your files hostage until you either purchase something from the ransomware’s author or pay the ransomware’s author money outright. Here is the password to unlock your files which have been locked by the ransomware Archiveus.