Hacker is offering a massive database of 272 million email passwords for sale. The deal is being advertised on the Dark Web and is priced at around $1.
An anonymous hacker of Russian origin, who goes online under the pseudonym “the Collector,” was identified by cybersecurity firm Hold Security as selling 1.17 billion email accounts, along with their passwords, through a Dark Web forum.
The stolen passwords apparently came from some of the world's largest email service providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Russia's Mail.ru.
When security analysts began negotiations with the hacker to verify the authenticity of this data, the Russian hacker asked for only 50 rubles (less than a dollar) in exchange for the entire database.
The amount was humiliatingly small and so the company proceeded with the transaction and acquisition of the database. After analyzing the data, Hold Security CEO, Mr. Alex Holden, stated that a large number of the 1.17 billion passwords turned out to be duplicates and triple entries and that in fact the database contained only 272 million unique entries.
According to the report they compiled, 57 million belong to Russia's leading provider Mail.ru, 40 million to Yahoo accounts, 33 million to Microsoft's Hotmail accounts, and 24 million Gmail accounts.
Also, of those 272 million passwords analyzed by Hold Security, about 42.5 million were new credentials that the company had not seen previously sold on the Dark Web, meaning the list came from people who were still hacking online.
