- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
- Content source
- http://techcrunch.com/2016/06/08/twitter-hack/
There is yet another hack for users of popular social media sites to worry about. Hackers may have used malware to collect more than 32 million Twitter login credentials that are now being sold on the dark web. Twitter says that its systems have not been breached.
“We are confident that these usernames and credentials were not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached. In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
LeakedSource, a site with a search engine of leaked login credentials, said in a blog post that it received a copy of the user information from “Tessa88@exploit.im,” the same alias used by the person who gave it hacked data from Russian social network VK last week.
Other major security compromises which have hit the news recently include a Myspace hack that involved over 360 million accounts, possibly making it the largest one ever, andthe leak of 100 million LinkedIn passwords stolen in 2012.
LeakedSource says the cache of Twitter data contains 32,888,300 records, including email addresses, usernames, and passwords. LeakedSource has added the information to its search engine, which is paid but lets people remove leaked information for free.
Based on information in the data (including the fact that many of the passwords are displayed in plaintext), LeakedSource believes that the user credentials were collected by malware infecting browsers like Firefox or Chrome rather than stolen directly from Twitter. Many of the affected users appear to be in Russia—six of the top 10 email domains represented in the database are Russian, including mail.ru and yandex.ru.
Read more: Passwords for 32M Twitter accounts may have been hacked and leaked
“We are confident that these usernames and credentials were not obtained by a Twitter data breach – our systems have not been breached. In fact, we’ve been working to help keep accounts protected by checking our data against what’s been shared from recent other password leaks,” a Twitter spokesperson said.
LeakedSource, a site with a search engine of leaked login credentials, said in a blog post that it received a copy of the user information from “Tessa88@exploit.im,” the same alias used by the person who gave it hacked data from Russian social network VK last week.
Other major security compromises which have hit the news recently include a Myspace hack that involved over 360 million accounts, possibly making it the largest one ever, andthe leak of 100 million LinkedIn passwords stolen in 2012.
LeakedSource says the cache of Twitter data contains 32,888,300 records, including email addresses, usernames, and passwords. LeakedSource has added the information to its search engine, which is paid but lets people remove leaked information for free.
Based on information in the data (including the fact that many of the passwords are displayed in plaintext), LeakedSource believes that the user credentials were collected by malware infecting browsers like Firefox or Chrome rather than stolen directly from Twitter. Many of the affected users appear to be in Russia—six of the top 10 email domains represented in the database are Russian, including mail.ru and yandex.ru.
Read more: Passwords for 32M Twitter accounts may have been hacked and leaked
