"reused accounts" being used to make edits in Sweden

Hello,

Andy from OSM’s Data Working Group here. We’ve received reports of some
strange editing activity in Sweden such as “nudging a hamlet by 2m” or
“deleting one created-by tag”. The accounts involved all seem to have
been unused for some time - as an example one might have been adding
things in Russia 5 years ago, then stopped, and suddenly starts making
small edits in Sweden within the last week or so. The edits themselves
don’t appear to be particularly problematic - they almost seem to be
“just seeing if they can make an edit”.

We’ve had confirmation from some of the accounts that these recent edits
weren’t made by them, so what we suspect has happened is that people
have used the same password for multiple sites on the internet, and if
one gets compromised, people can use credentials obtained from there
elsewhere.

You can see the changeset discussion comments that I have left at
http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=61942&commented

If anyone spots anything odd or has got any other questions you can mail
OSM’s Data Working Group at data at osmfoundation.org .

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend, on behalf of OSM’s Data Working Group.