Google and Microsoft Email Encounter Massive Security Intrusion and Russian Hacker Carnival
According to foreign reports, a security expert said that hundreds of millions of stolen e-mail accounts and user names and passwords of other websites were being traded on the black market in Russia.
Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, a security company, said that of the 272.3 million stolen accounts that had been found, most of them were from the most popular e-mail Mail.ru users in Russia, and a small number were from Google (Weibo), Yahoo and Microsoft e-mail users.
This email account and password theft incident has become one of the largest network security intrusions since network hackers attacked American banks and retailers two years ago.
Previously, Horton also helped expose some of the world's largest known data intrusion events. These security intrusions affected tens of millions of users of Adobe Systems, JPMorgan Chase and Target, a graphic design, publishing and imaging software design company, and exposed them to various subsequent cyber criminal activities.
The researchers of Hold Security found a young Russian hacker on an online forum who claimed that he had collected a large number of stolen accounts and passwords and was ready to publish them.
Houghton said that after deleting the copied account, the security intrusion event involved nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts. At the end of last year, Mail.ru just announced that it has 64 million active users for months. This means that, The accounts of most Mail.ru users have been hacked. The data stolen in this security intrusion also includes tens of millions of accounts and passwords of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, the world's three largest e-mail suppliers, and hundreds of thousands of e-mail accounts of German and Chinese e-mail suppliers.
"The stolen data is very large. This news has spread widely in the black market. The Russian hacker said that he is willing to give these data to those who are good to him." Horton said, "These accounts and passwords may have been abused many times."
The transaction price is less than $1
Paradoxically, the hacker charged only 50 rubles - less than $1 for all the data. After the researchers of Hold Security agreed to help him speak well on the hacker forum, the hacker finally submitted all the data sets to the company. Horton said that his company's policy is to refuse to pay for stolen data.
Such large-scale stolen data may be used to further steal the account information of contacts related to the stolen account, thus greatly increasing the risk of financial theft or reputation damage.
Hackers know that users like to reuse their preferred passwords. Although security experts repeatedly advise users to change their passwords or set more complex passwords, they never listen. Because of this, hackers can often use the password in one account to log in to other accounts of this user.
After learning that this large-scale e-mail account was invaded, A spokeswoman for Mail.ru said, "We are checking whether the user name and password of e-mail users match their e-mail. Once we check them out, we will notify the relevant users immediately." She added, The preliminary check result of Mail.ru did not find that any user name and password match the existing e-mail.
Microsoft spokesman said that the news of the e-mail account theft has unfortunately become a reality. "Microsoft has deployed appropriate security measures to detect affected accounts. It also needs more information to confirm the identity of the account owner and help them regain their exclusive login rights."
Yahoo and Google have not commented on this.
There were 40 million Mail e-mail accounts invaded by Yahoo, accounting for 15% of all 272.3 million stolen accounts; At the same time, 33 million Hotmail accounts were invaded by Microsoft, accounting for 12%; The number of Gmail accounts invaded by Google was 24 million, accounting for about 9%
Thousands of stolen users and passwords appear to belong to employees of some large U.S. banking institutions, production companies and retail companies.
According to a recent survey report released by the Cloud Security Alliance, network account information theft accounts for 22% of all data intrusion incidents
Horton is a Ukrainian American who specializes in cyber crime threats in Eastern Europe. In 2014, he disclosed that 1.2 billion accounts had been hacked. This has become the largest account intrusion event discovered in the world.
His company is responsible for tracking dynamic information in forums and chat rooms, and monitoring potential network security threats. They use these hackers' jargon to communicate with them, and record and establish the files of various criminals.
Horton said that identifying the identity of the hackers who spread the stolen account information might expose his researchers' investigative methods. Since the hacker collected these data from multiple channels, researchers nicknamed him "Collector".
10 days ago, Hold Security has informed the organizations affected by this data intrusion event. The company's policy is to return the stolen data found to the invaded company for free.
"This is stolen data, and we will not sell the stolen goods," Horton said.
