Russian Hacker Has Hacked More Than 2 Billion Passwords And Is Willing To Sell Them To Anyone Who Is Nice To Him

After reading this article, it is likely you will seriously consider changing your passwords for your email address, because login ID’s, as well as passwords of over 3 billion people, have been hacked. This information has been taken from companies such as Gmail, Hotmail/Live Mail, Yahoo Mail and many other email service providers that are being traded in Russia’s violent crime world.

Most of these thieved addresses ended up being noticed by Hold Security. Experts at Hold Security stumbled upon a Russian programmer, known as the Collector, saying that he was happy to hand over all of the hacked accounts – more than 1 billion functional accounts. After analyzing the hack, the experts at Hold Security were able to remove the duplicate accounts, thus making the number 2.73 billion. In which, the largest portion of the targeted emails belonged to mail.ru, the preferred emailing service in Russia. More than 50 million mail.ru users have been affected. Mail.ru has more than 62 million users visiting their page on monthly basis, so this means that the invasion affects a vast majority of mail.ru’s user database.

The remainder can be broken down into various other prominent email business, such as Google Mail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. These providers had more than 35 million email accounts jeopardized. Gmail had more than 20 million accounts hacked, while Microsoft’s Hotmail topped the charts with more than 30 million stolen login details. Login details from local email services in China, as well as Germany, have also been hacked. Although the experts state that many of these accounts have not been breached, a number of the email addresses connect to personnel of some of the biggest U.S. financial, production, and merchandising businesses.

“These details are compelling,” Alex Holden, initiator and chief information security officer at Hold Security, informed Reuters. “It’s drifting about in the criminal world, and this individual indicates that he is ready to give the information away to those who are good to him. These types of login details can be mistreated more than once.”

The Russian programmer presumably requested 50 rubles – less than a dollar – for the information. Hold Security got the information from the hacker after they promised the hacker that they would post positive feedback about the hacker on many hacker forums. The corporation did not pay for the compromised information, as it is not their company policy. After getting the information from Host Security, experts at mail.ru are testing whether or not login details fit the email addresses that are currently active. Once the company completes the tests, they will update their users on taking further steps to help them secure their accounts. However, their first few checks did not find any matching results.

However, a Microsoft representative stated that their servers had a security feature that detects compromised accounts and informs users as soon as they detect suspicious activity.

On the other hand, Google was not quick to fix the detected profiles. These types of hacks, such as the one the search giant spotted two years ago, are a sad reality. “It is essential to realize that in this case as well as in others, the hacked user ID’s and passwords hadn’t been the outcome of an infringement of the Google systems,” Google stated in a blog post in 2014. “Many times, such login details are acquired by using a mix of different resources. For example, if one reuses the same login details on every website they have an account on, and in an event, if one of those websites gets compromised then, in that case, your details may be used to sign into other websites. Or hackers can use infections or phishing strategies to acquire your user ID along with your password.”

Such credential hacks reinforce the idea that a two-way authentication set-up needs to be provided regularly, so the tech companies can contact you in such cases. So, in short, it is always a good practice to create strong passwords and use two-way authentication when available.

Source: CNET

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