Earlier today news spread that social application site RockYou had suffered a data breached that resulted in the exposure of over 32 Million user accounts. To compound the severity of the security breach, it was found that RockYou are storing all user account data in plain text in their database, exposing all that information to attackers. RockYou have yet to inform users of the breach, and their blog is eerily silent – but the details of the security breach are going from bad to worse.

The first issue is that RockYou attempted to downplay the entire incident, first by covering it up by not notifying users and then downplaying it in an official statement as being an issue that only affected ‘older’ applications. The hacker responsible for the initial breach published a small portion of the dataset he had retrieved and was able to show that not only did he have access to their entire database, but also passwords were stored in the clear. This matter now appears worse than originally suspected as the dataset also contains a table where RockYou have stored user credentials for social networks and other partner sites.