Today everyone's favorite (or least favorite, perhaps) cyberbandits, LulzSec, leaked 62,000 peoples' email addresses and passwords.

The listing, which can be found here in text file form, has lots of different users and passwords.  A few notes -- the passwords appear to be all 15 or less characters and don't include capital letters (the last entry seems a fluke).  

This could simply be a coincidence that speaks to peoples' password tendencies these days, or it could be a sign that LulzSec used brute force attacks to crack these passwords.  

Using an SSD-driven rainbow tables approach, a 14-character hashed password can be cracked in about 5 seconds; cracking 62,000 passwords would take approximately three and a half days, at most (probably less if you exclude capitals).  Of course that's for Windows passwords, which use MD4 hashing.  More secure sites likely use MD5 and SHA1, in addition to salting, and a high iteration account -- of course there's plenty of sites that are probably using MD4 with no salting or -- as the Sony hacks showed -- storing passwords as cleartext in web accessible databases.

Many users whose email addresses were hacked subsequently had their Twitter or Facebook accounts illegitimately accessed and defaced [source].  It appears that the internet equivalent of a mob is behind these attacks -- thousands of individuals have downloaded the file containing the passwords and begun to try to access peoples' accounts.

The Next Web has been promoting a tool to find if you've been hacked, stating, "We've promised we won't say who built it, but can absolutely 100% assure it wasn't LulzSec and there's no email harvesting going on."

That said, the widget -- originally hosted here -- is the work of an unknown developer, so entrusting it with your emails might not be wise.

As always you can maintain safety online by:

1. Using one-time use accounts for your various online registrations (to avoid one account being compromised allowing others to be compromised).
2. Use passphrases with numbers, capital letters, and preferably ASCII symbols.
3. Make sure your passwords are over 20 characters long.
4. Don't reuse passwords.
5. Don't share passwords with anyone.