There's probably a very good reason why the Russian hacker wanted to sell 272 million email credentials from popular email services for less than $1.
The reason:
Millions of accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and the Russian email service Mail.ru appear to be fake.
"Our security team investigated the issue and we do not believe there is any risk to our users," a Yahoo spokesperson told Tech Insider.
The largest number of leaked accounts are believed to be from Mail.ru. Without the duplicate entries, the data leaked from that company amounts to around 57 million accounts, or to put it another way, the number is more than half the number of people who use Russia's leading email service.
But a Mail.ru spokesperson dismissed the hacked database claim and said it was nothing more than a publicity stunt by Alex Holden of Hold Security, the researcher who uncovered the leak.
“The analysis shows that 99.982% of the credentials from Mail.Ru accounts found in the database are invalid. The database is most likely a collection of some old data dumps collected from hacking online services,” said company spokesperson Madina Tayupova.
“Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the sole purpose of announcing the leak was to create a media hype and draw public attention to Hold Security’s security operations.”
A related post on Motherboard reports that Holden refused to share the data so that journalists could review the emails . When asked about Mail.ru's response, Holden said:
“Mail.ru provides access to email services and their users use their mail.ru email addresses as unique identities in services other than mail.ru (e.g. social media). I do not believe that the hackers stole the data from mail.ru but from the services that mail.ru users use their email addresses for.”
S.S.:OK… you're right, don't worry.
