Another data breach was recently discovered by the now-famous hacker
nicknamed Peace (or Peace_of_mind) – the same Russian hacker who was behind the massive breaches of some of the most popular social media sites, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr, and VK. Com.
The hacker is now selling over 51 million files originating from iMesh (a file-sharing service).
New York City-based iMesh was one of the first and most popular file-sharing services that allowed users to share media files with their friends via P2P.
Launched in the late 1990s, iMesh quickly became the third largest service in the United States in 2009, but the service unexpectedly shut down last month.
LeakedSource announced in a blog post that the company has obtained a database containing over 51 million iMesh accounts. The same database has also been put up for sale on the online marketplace “The Real Deal Dark Web” by the same hacker who also put up data from LinkedIn, Tumblr, MySpace, and Twitter.
According to LeakedSource's analysis, the stolen database contains user information, including email addresses, usernames, passwords, IP addresses, and other information about users.
Although iMesh stored all access codes in hashed format, the codes were “salted” with the MD5 algorithm, which is easy for someone to crack these days.
Based on the most recent leaked database entries, it is estimated that the hacker breached iMesh on September 22, 2013.
The database contains 13.7 million users from the US, about 4 million from Turkey, over 3.5 million from the UK, and the rest from other parts of the world.
Most users signed up with Hotmail (14.3 million) and Yahoo (10.5 million), and almost 1 million users used 123456 as their password.
All the data is now for sale on the Dark Web for just 0.5 Bitcoin (about $335).
That's why it's time to change your passwords for all social networking sites immediately, especially if you use the same password for different websites.
