There has been a surge in Reddit users getting hacked

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Steven Pavlov/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Redditors just won't stop getting hacked.

The social news site has reset 100,000 passwords in the last two weeks, an administrator announced, as it put out a fresh warning about keeping accounts secure.

There has been a "general uptick in account takeovers (ATOs) by malicious (or at best spammy) third parties," wrote KeyserSosa in Reddit's official Announcements subreddit on Thurday.

KeyserSosa — real name Christopher Slowe, Reddit's founding engineer — believes this is down to recent public dumps of hacked passwords, notably a LinkedIn data dump that revealed more than 100 million passwords.

Would-be account hijackers can comb these dumps for password and email address/user name combinations, then try them out on other websites. It's a reminder of why you shouldn't reuse passwords for multiple accounts on different services: If one account is breached, then all of them are.

It's likely that if Reddit is seeing a surge in account hijacking following these passwords dumps, then other popular websites and services across the internet also are.

Slowe shares a few tips for defending yourself against account takeover attempts on Reddit, including setting a strong unique password for each account, verify an email address as an extra line of defence, and checking your activity page for IP addresses you don't recognise.

Here's the full announcement:

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See Also:

• Researchers figured out how to hack into a Mitsubishi car and turn off the alarm

• A hacker is selling 100 million user accounts from 'Russia's Facebook'

• Mark Zuckerberg's social-media accounts got hacked, and his password is terrible

SEE ALSO: The massive LinkedIn hack shows that people are awful at picking passwords