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Hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for email accounts and other websites are being traded in Russia's criminal underworld, a security expert told Reuters.
The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru (MAILRq.L), Russia's most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google (GOOGL.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security.
The latest discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up totalling 1.17 billion records.
After eliminating duplicates, Holden said, the cache contained nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts - a big chunk of the 64 million monthly active email users Mail.ru said it had at the end of last year. It also included tens of millions of credentials for the world's three big email providers, Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese email providers.
"This information is potent. It is floating around in the underground and this person has shown he's willing to give the data away to people who are nice to him," said Holden, the former chief security officer at U.S. brokerage R.W. Baird. "These credentials can be abused multiple times," he said.
Exclusive: Big data breaches found at major email services - expert| Reuters
The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru (MAILRq.L), Russia's most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google (GOOGL.O), Yahoo (YHOO.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security.
The latest discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up totalling 1.17 billion records.
After eliminating duplicates, Holden said, the cache contained nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts - a big chunk of the 64 million monthly active email users Mail.ru said it had at the end of last year. It also included tens of millions of credentials for the world's three big email providers, Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, plus hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese email providers.
"This information is potent. It is floating around in the underground and this person has shown he's willing to give the data away to people who are nice to him," said Holden, the former chief security officer at U.S. brokerage R.W. Baird. "These credentials can be abused multiple times," he said.
Exclusive: Big data breaches found at major email services - expert| Reuters
