- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
User accounts for iMesh, a now defunct file sharing service, are for sale on the dark web.
The New York-based music and video sharing company was a peer-to-peer service, which rose to fame in the file sharing era of the early-2000s, riding the waves of the aftermath of the "dotcom" boom. After the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the company in 2003 for encouraging copyright infringement, the company was given status as the first "approved" peer-to-peer service.
At its peak in 2009, the service became the third-largest service in the US. But last month, iMesh unexpectedly shut down after more than a decade in business.
LeakedSource, a breach notification site that allows users to see if their details have been leaked, has obtained the database.
The group's analysis of the database shows it contains a little over 51 million accounts.
The database, of which a portion was shared with ZDNet for verification, contains user information that dates back to late-2005 when the site launched, including email addresses, passwords (which were hashed and salted with MD5, an algorithm that nowadays is easy to crack), usernames, a user's location and IP address, registration date, and other information -- such as if the account is disabled, or if the account has inbox messages.
LeakedSource said in a blog post that iMesh was likely breached in September 2013, based on the most recent records in the database.
In a message on Saturday, one of the group members said that "someone obviously hacked" the site, but did not speculate on who was responsible. "Who knows who really did it," the person said.
For its part, the company's chief operating officer Roi Zemmer said in an email that the company "is not aware of any hacks" and "is currently using state of the art technology to protect users' info."
After repeated requests, Zemmer did not confirm whether or not a sample of the database we sent him, which was provided by LeakedSource, was valid. Zemmer did not outright deny that the company had been hacked.
Attempts to follow up with Zemmer over the weekend went unanswered.
Read more: A hacker has stolen 51 million accounts from a major file-sharing site
