You read that title right. A group of researchers are claiming that a Russian cybergang has stolen a staggering 1.2 billion passwords from a variety of websites:
The US firm Hold Security said the gang which it dubbed “CyberVor” collected confidential user names and passwords were stolen from some 420,000 websites, ranging from household names to small Internet sites.
“As long as your data is somewhere on the World Wide Web, you may be affected by this breach,” Hold said in a statement on its website.
“Your data has not necessarily been stolen from you directly. It could have been stolen from the service or goods providers to whom you entrust your personal information, from your employers, even from your friends and family.”
The security firm, which specializes in research on large data breaches, said the cybergang acquired databases of stolen credentials from fellow hackers on the black market, and then installed malware that allowed them to gain access to many websites and social media accounts.
“To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials, eventually ending up with the largest cache of stolen personal information, totaling over 1.2 billion unique sets of e-mails and passwords,” the researchers said.
Now, if this is true, this is truly frightening. A credit card can be easily canceled. But personal credentials like an email address, Social Security number or password can be used for identity theft. Because people tend to use the same passwords for different sites, criminals test stolen credentials on websites where valuable information can be gleaned. Thus this can quickly become very very bad for anyone affected.
My advice? If you’re paranoid, change your passwords now. This article can help you with that. I personally am waiting to see who was affected and what those sites are doing to inform affected users.
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This entry was posted on August 6, 2014 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags hack, Russia, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Russian Cybergang Stole 1.2 BILLION Passwords
You read that title right. A group of researchers are claiming that a Russian cybergang has stolen a staggering 1.2 billion passwords from a variety of websites:
The US firm Hold Security said the gang which it dubbed “CyberVor” collected confidential user names and passwords were stolen from some 420,000 websites, ranging from household names to small Internet sites.
“As long as your data is somewhere on the World Wide Web, you may be affected by this breach,” Hold said in a statement on its website.
“Your data has not necessarily been stolen from you directly. It could have been stolen from the service or goods providers to whom you entrust your personal information, from your employers, even from your friends and family.”
The security firm, which specializes in research on large data breaches, said the cybergang acquired databases of stolen credentials from fellow hackers on the black market, and then installed malware that allowed them to gain access to many websites and social media accounts.
“To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials, eventually ending up with the largest cache of stolen personal information, totaling over 1.2 billion unique sets of e-mails and passwords,” the researchers said.
Now, if this is true, this is truly frightening. A credit card can be easily canceled. But personal credentials like an email address, Social Security number or password can be used for identity theft. Because people tend to use the same passwords for different sites, criminals test stolen credentials on websites where valuable information can be gleaned. Thus this can quickly become very very bad for anyone affected.
My advice? If you’re paranoid, change your passwords now. This article can help you with that. I personally am waiting to see who was affected and what those sites are doing to inform affected users.
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This entry was posted on August 6, 2014 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags hack, Russia, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.