2 Million Facebook,Google,Yahoo,Twitter,etc stolen passwords discovered.
A team of researchers has managed to find a
server with more than two million login passwords of users belonging
to popular services like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo!
The security team over at Trustwave’s SpiderLabs revealed in a blog post called
“Look What I Found!” that it had stumbled upon a database that contains
about 1.58 million stolen username and passwords. These login passwords belong to more than 93,000 websites, including
318,121 Facebook accounts, 59,549 Yahoo! accounts, 54,437 Google
accounts and 21,708 Twitter accounts.
After the news emerged, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter started
resetting passwords of accounts that could have been compromised,
reports PC World.
Payroll processor ADP, also named in the list of affected services, has
reset passwords of about 2,400 users but believes its internal network
was not compromised. Facebook reset passwords and said, ”While
details of this case are not yet clear, it appears that people’s
computers may have been attacked by hackers using malware to scrape
information directly from their web browsers.” LinkedIn and Twitter
too said that they had been working closely with SpoderLabs over the
past week in order to reset affected accounts.
These passwords were found on a Pony Botnet server, a while after the
source code for the Pony Botnet Controller was leaked. Apart from these
familiar sites, vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru, two popular Russian social
networks, also make an appearance on the list released by SpiderLabs.
The
geo-location statistics show a staggering amount of the hacking was
targeted at the Netherlands. A closer look at the IP log files, says the
team, shows that most of the entries from the Netherlands are in fact
from a single IP address that seems to have functioned as a gateway or
reverse proxy between the infected machines and the Command-and-Control
server, which resides in the Netherlands as well.
Unfortunately,
this also means that researchers are unable to actually pinpoint which
countries were on the radar of this hack. Contrary to initial reports,
the attack was not concentrated to just the Netherlands, but with 90
countries on the list, was really a global attack.
Even while the
server was running the Pony app, it’s not clear how these credentials
were gathered. It could be possible that keyloggers or malware on the
same lines were installed on infected computers or were plain and simple
phished from fake websites. SpiderLabs ran a quick test on password
hygiene of those that leaked and, not surprisingly, the team found
passwords like “123456” forming a majority of the leaked password trove.
Overall, Spider Labs rated six percent of the passwords "terrible," 28
percent "bad," 44 percent "medium," 17 percent "good," and five percent
of them as "excellent."
Credit:-Tech2.in.com