Tens of millions of passwords and personal data in the hands of hackers.
Experts in the field of cyber security said on recently exposed for sale the basis of several hundred million previously stolen accounts modern users of many widely popular email services. For example, they include the millions of personal information of users Mail.ru. On the existing database of as many as hundreds of millions suddenly stolen logins and passwords from the mailbox with a very popular online mail services, including Gmail.com and Mail.ru was told by the specialist in cyber security, founder of Hold Security A. Holden.
According to the expert, the base has about 272,3 million stolen usernames and passwords, most of which belong to users Mail.ru and to a lesser extent, Internet users Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft. According to him, this is one of the largest databases of stolen information, since cyber attacks on major banks and various retail stores States that occurred 2 years ago.
As explained Holden, to detect this base was only after the workers of his company went to one of Russian hackers, who on one of the famous online forums boasted that he collected and even ready to send of 1.17 billion stolen credentials. At the same time for the transmission of extensive database hacker asked for only 50 rubles., said an anonymous source.
Checking the database itself and deleting the duplicates, the representatives Hold Security was able to count 57 million credentials modern user Mail.ru. If you compare the end of last year, the monthly audience of active users of the popular email Mail.ru amounted to 64 million people. Also in the above-mentioned base was just tens of millions of account credentials of the users of three of the world’s largest email providers, namely Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of data from various postal services of China and Germany.
Experts of “market leader” note that in Mail.ru already managed to comment on statements by Holden. This company announced that it had contacted him and received from him the necessary data for analysis. “The study is the first random sample clearly demonstrated that it does not contain any passwords that fit to the active accounts. Besides, it is noteworthy that the database contains many one and the same usernames with different passwords, which suggests that it was compiled from the fragments of completely different databases, where the users as a login used private e-mail”, — noted in comments. “We are continuing to review the database and when we have more information, we will notify users who suddenly could suffer”, — stated in the aforementioned company.
