Adobe — the software giant and creator of Photoshop — was hacked and put some Ohio University students’ accounts at risk.
The attack occurred a few months ago, but a recent list of compromised email accounts included OU students, sparking concern from OU’s Office of Information Technology.
“The attack's been known for a while,” said Sean O’Malley, OIT communications manager. “They more recently came across one of the files that had been published, and they looked through and they could see that there were OU email addresses in that file.”
An email was distributed Wednesday night to students affected by the attacks.
“While Adobe's breach did not affect the university directly, it has the potential to affect you personally, depending on how well you protect your OHIO password,” the email said. “If you used your OHIO password for an adobe.com account, then you should change it immediately.”
“At this point, awareness is what we can do for people. Make sure they are aware of it, and that they are doing good password practices,” O’Malley said.
Adobe released a statement specifying its decision to reset passwords to prevent unauthorized access to Adobe ID accounts.
OIT suggests student be cautious with their online accounts going forward.
“Probably the biggest takeaway from this that I hope people would get is that it’s not a good idea to use one password for a million different services. It just makes it way easier for people to break into your account,” O’Malley said.
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