Security Firm Recovers Over 272 Million Stolen Credentials from a Collector

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Security Firm Recovers Over 272 Million Stolen Credentials from a Collector

By CircleID Reporter
May 05, 2016, 5:10 pm PDT Views: 11,973 Add Comment

The latest discovery came while researchers at a security firm 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, Reuters reports. After eliminating duplicates the collection is reported to have contained nearly 57 million accounts of Russia’s most popular email service, Mail.ru—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 Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security. “These credentials can be abused multiple times,” he said.

By CircleID Reporter

CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.

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