UPDATE 1 @ 0032h: For some evidence on this topic check this particular Digg that wasn’t deleted, but was buried. In the comments there is chatter about the Digg submission that was obliterated, an admission from the Digger who’s account was deleted and his reasons for posting the results of a phishing attack

So, let’s tally the frontpage gaffe’s for Digg these past few weeks. First, there was the fake PS3 story about over 650 000 PS3 units that had to be recalled; next, there was the the spammer who profited big time from getting his post from a splog onto the front page (weight loss tips from a dental site? come ON).

Well, all that was minor beans compared to this.

Thanks to some quick detective work over at Zdnitchit, there was another front page funtime story last night around 11pm; because the submitter and the post have been obliterated (not buried), we’ll have to take his word on things — but for the amount of detail he’s coming up, it sounds too amazing to believe its made up.

What happened?

The cliffnotes version is that a phisher’s attacks on 6000 MySpace accounts — email accounts, passwords and all — was published as a post on some blog; that blog was posted to Digg, exposing it to hundreds, perhaps thousands of visitors before it was taken down (and had over 200 votes, apparently)

Some people, before it was obliterated, decided to test the account names and passwords by actually going into myspace and fooling around with those accounts.

It worked.

One commenter (before the whole thing was allegedly blown up) also mentioned that many people use the same passwords for all kinds of things — including PayPal accounts … which you log in with your email address.

For a privacy disaster that makes the AOL Data Valdez scandal a few months ago look like a piss in the pond, I hope three examples in as many weeks is enough “proof” that Digg needs to button down on its front page news.