Millions of Email Accounts up for Sale

According to Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, hundreds of millions of hacked usernames and passwords for some of the world's largest webmail providers have been discovered up for sale on the Russian Dark Web.

The breakdown of leaked info is a cache that consists of 272.3 million stolen account credentials. Yahoo Mail credentials, which numbered 40 million, or 15% of the 272 million unique IDs discovered. 33 million, or 12%, were Microsoft Hotmail accounts and 9%, or nearly 24 million, were Gmail.

Russian email provider Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service totaled 57 million compromised accounts. In addition are thousands of other stolen username/password combinations which appear to belong to employees of some of the largest US banking, manufacturing and retail companies.

The discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging about the heist in an online forum. The young hacker put up the info for sale for only 50 rubles which amounts to about a dollar. It would appear that the young man was in it for the notoriety.

"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 Holden. "These credentials can be abused multiple times [due to password reuse].”

Source: InfoSecurity