Millions of Email Passwords Hacked in Massive Data Breach: Report

According to a Reuters report, over 250 million email usernames and passwords have been breached and are being used by “Russia’s criminal underworld”.

Millions of Email Passwords Hacked in Massive Data Breach: Report

Alex Holden, the founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, who reported the records breach, informed Reuters that the breach disturbs various email addresses on Russia’s prevalent Mail.ru service, along with addresses from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

He also stated that his company met a Russian hacker who professed to have over 1 billion hacked addresses on sale. After excluding duplicates, overall the list had 57 million Mail.ru addresses, 40 million Yahoo addresses, 33 million Hotmail addresses and 24 million Gmail addresses.

“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.”

Holden told Reuters.

Besides those stated, there were also thousands of email addresses from German and Chinese email servers involved in the percentage.

A Microsoft spokesperson also said that:

“Unfortunately, there are places on the internet where leaked and stolen credentials are posted, and when we come across these or someone sends them to us, we act to protect customers. Microsoft has security measures in place to detect account compromise and requires additional information to verify the account owner and help them regain sole access to their account.”

Furthermore a Google spokesperson informed that they were incapable to comment on particular occurrences, but they report abuse as soon as possible.

The breach is the recent in a sequence of significant incidents. Previous year, the data of almost 100 million people was pilfered from nine companies, including the Wall Street Journal and J.P. Morgan, the biggest-ever such breach in the United States. Representatives of Mail.ru and Yahoo have not commented on the issue so far.