Yahoo and Formspring became the latest victims of major password-hacking incidents last week, following high-profile incidents at LinkedIn, eHarmony and Last.fm in June. The LinkedIn breach alone resulted in 6.5m hashed passwords being published on a hacking forum.

We are seeing the frequency of high-profile hacking incidents escalate and I can only see that pattern continuing to build. In some cases the hackers will be motivated only by a desire to expose what they regard as unacceptable weaknesses in the online defences of governments or organisations, however, in others cases, criminal hackers will have less altruistic intentions. Read more »