In what is being described as the largest data breach in history, a group of Russian hackers has pilfered 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from poorly secured databases.
Hold Security, which discovered the breach, said the logins and passwords, belonging to roughly 500 million e-mail addresses, were just a portion of the more than 4.5 billion records stolen by the Russian gang.
Dubbed CyberVor, the group is able to rack up such impressive numbers because it has robbed more than 420,000 web and FTP sites, Hold Security said.
“Through the underground black market, the CyberVors got access to data from botnet networks (a large group of virus-infected computers controlled by one criminal system),” Hold Security said in a blog post.
“These botnets used victims’ systems to identify SQL vulnerabilities on the sites they visited. The botnet conducted possibly the largest security audit ever. Over 400,000 sites were identified to be potentially vulnerable to SQL injection flaws alone. The CyberVors used these vulnerabilities to steal data from these sites’ databases. To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials.”
Hold Security declined to name the victims of the attack. The company told the New York Times that nondisclosure agreements aside, it was concerned revealing the victims could leave them open to future attacks for those whose sites remained vulnerable.
