Police have arrested two young hackers after they hacked into more than half a million accounts from online services. Russian authorities said the duo came to their attention in 2015 when they carried out a large-scale dictionary attack, an attack that involves trying hundreds of thousands of random words as passwords.
However, the 2015 hack was not their last. According to the police statement, the sophisticated hackers managed to gain access to more than 500,000 accounts of different services, using the same credentials they obtained from the Russian service, as people often use the same combinations on multiple online platforms. In addition, they assigned third parties to their legal tasks, such as attacks or research for additional services that they could hack, offering up to 50% of their profits. Their techniques were quite advanced, as they used more than 35,000 different IPs and changed User-agents after each login attempt to avoid suspicion.
The two hackers, aged 18 and 19, worked in parallel. One had the technical knowledge, while the other found a way to break into each account. Both remain under house arrest for the time being.
The exploitation of reward point programs is very common on the dark web, especially in programs related to travel bonuses.
