Data on the 2010 Gawker Media password breach

A major security breach event for 2010 was the password disclosure at
Gawker Media.

On December 12th, 2010 Gawker Media discovered that their servers were
compromised, resulting in a security breach at their web sites:
Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin,
and Fleshbot. The result was that depending on the reporting
somewhere near or just over 1 million usernames, email addresses, and
passwords were purloined and the attackers displayed the data files on
at least one server for the world to look at.

I particularly liked (and have gone back to read and reference several
times) the December 13th reporting of the the Wall Street Journal on
the Gawker Media disclosure. In this articles the authors took a look
at a subset of the disclosed data; almost 190,000 accounts and did a
data analysis on the passwords that set contained. See:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/13/the-top-50-gawker-media-passwords/

Another good read was from the folks at Gawker; see “FAQ: Compromised
Commenting Accounts on Gawker Media”
http://lifehacker.com/#!5712785