Those of you who have a Formspring account might want to take a minute to go and check on it. Formspring announced today, July 10, 2012, that it has had a security breach. and that some user passwords may have been accessed.
They are taking a precautionary measure and asking all Formspring members to change their passwords now. The same blog post that announces the security breach has advice about some guidelines that they recommend you use in order to create a strong password.
I found out about this just a few minutes ago when Formspring sent me an ominous sounding email.
At first, I wasn’t sure if this email was legitimate, or if it was some sort of phishing scheme. So, I opened up a new window in my browser and attempted to log in to my Formspring account. The result wasn’t good.
Since I was getting nowhere, I decided to click the word “resend”, in the hopes that this would help me to recover my Formspring account. I rarely use it, but even so, I didn’t like the idea of it potentially being accessible by someone other than myself. It took a few tries, but I was, eventually, sent an email that gave me a link to click on so that I could reset my Formspring password.
I was able to click on the new link that I was sent. However, this did not enable me to achieve a desirable result.
Uh-oh! I ended up having Formspring resend another email, with a new link inside it. That one worked, and I was able to successfully access my Formspring account, and change the password to something completely different than what it was before the security breach. I figured it was worth it to send out this little “heads up” to other people out there who are using Formspring. Hopefully, after reading this, you won’t panic if Formspring sends you an email like the one it sent me.