The FBI has linked a hacker with the alias Mr. Grey to the theft of 1.2 billion data from 420,000 websites.
As reported by Register, it may be the biggest data theft in history.
The US agency said the hacker used open source data including email addresses published on Russian criminal forums and domain.
Mr. Grey, a member of the CyberVor group, as reported by Reuters, used all of the above data to then sell information on all social media including Facebook, Twitter and the Russian VK.
Documents released by a Milwaukee court showed that Mr. Grey offered account information for sale in 2011. U.S. law enforcement had no comment on the hacker.
The thief was revealed by Hold Security, which at that time had said that the intruders used bot-infected computers to find the 420,000 websites that were vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
The anonymous websites went under the control of those who handled the malicious software, which later returned to collect sensitive data from vulnerable servers.
The south-central Russian group managed to extract the staggering amount of 4.5 billion credentials, which when deduplicated were 1.2 billion. There were 542 million unique email addresses in the extracted cache.
The hacked websites ranged from household names to small businesses worldwide!
Until now Facebook and Twitter have not made any comments, nor the FBI and the US Department of Justice. We expect how the case will evolve and what actions the parties involved will take in the case.
