According to Alex Holden of Hold Security, the details of 272.3 million emails accounts are being freely traded online having been obtained by a young Russian hacker. He was bragging that he had collected and was going to give away a large number of stolen credentials that amounted to 1.17 billion records. Around 40m of the addresses were Yahoo Mail, 33m Hotmail and 24m for Google’s Gmail service.
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The company that suffered the biggest security breach was Russia’s most popular email service, Mail.ru, but millions of accounts from Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail were also compromised.
Hold Security paid nothing for the trove of email credentials. After the hacker provided samples of the data, and the researchers verified the stolen credentials, they determined it was a “collection of multiple breaches”.
Mail.ru added that its initial checks showed that none of the passwords were now active.
Holden, who was a former chief security officer at USA brokerage R.W. Baird, said: “This information is potent”. A Microsoft spokesperson said stolen credentials was an unfortunate reality but that it had measures in place to detect account compromise (one of which is two-step verification). Email providers Mail.ru, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investigating the situation. Holden, who is fluent in Russian, said he wouldn’t pay for the data but would give him “likes” on various social media posts in exchange. According to its analysis there are over 272 million unique email and unencrypted password pairs, where 42.5 million have not been previously leaked.
“Thousands” of the “stolen username/password combinations appear to belong to employees of some of the largest USA banking, manufacturing and retail companies”, Holden said.
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Reportedly 10 days ago Hold Security began informing the affected organizations and while the hacker has not yet been identified, he has been given the nickname “The Collector” due to the way he collected data across so many sources. Given that the service has 64 million monthly active users, the breach affects most of the company’s user base. So, if you’re still using your old password, it is high time that you consider changing it. The hacker may well have provided the account details to others, and Holden says they can be “abused multiple times”. What makes this discovery more significant is the hacker’s willingness to share these credentials virtually for free, increasing the number of… malicious people who might have this information.
