Huge haul for Russian hackers
A gang of Russian hackers has amassed over 1 billion username and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, stolen from hundreds of thousands of websites, The New York Times reports this evening.
The massive haul was discovered by the Milwaukee firm Hold Security -- which also exposed last year's theft of tens of millions of Adobe Systems records -- and verified by an independent security expert working on behalf of the Times.
Some large U.S. companies are already aware that their records are among the stolen data, another expert who looked at the records told the Times.
"Hackers did not just target U.S. companies, they targeted any website they could get, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to very small websites," Hold Security Founder Alex Holden told the Times. "And most of these sites are still vulnerable."
The hackers do not appear to be connected with the Russian government, Holden said, and have not yet sold much of the information they collected.
Hold Security has been in contact with the hacking ring, which it describes as "based in a small city in south central Russia, the region flanked by Kazakhstan and Mongolia," and comprised of "fewer than a dozen men in their 20s who know one another personally -- not just virtually."
No comments:
Post a Comment