Russian data breach steals 1.2 billion username password combinations

A Russian crime ring has been credited with breaching and obtaining 1.2 billion username and password combinations including 500 million email accounts. This information was taken from over 420,000 websites ranging from large house hold names to small companies. Hold Security reported the breach on Tuesday and has reported that the hackers targeted any website they could get their hands on, including U.S. and foreign sites. The names of the victims have not been released due to non-disclosure agreements.

This breach is the largest of its kind and has security experts concerned over the security of online personal information. In December, 40 million credit cards and 70 million addresses, phone numbers and other personal information was stolen from Target by Eastern European hackers. 3 months before that a Vietnamese identity theft firm stole 200 million records, including social security numbers, credit cards and bank information from Court Ventures, now owned by Experian. However, this most recent breach trumps all of those by a massive margin.

Yet despite the size of this breach security experts do not seem that worried. Coincidentally the announcement of this breach coincided with the opening day of Black Hat, a huge computer security conference held in Las Vegas every August. Some Security experts say that this is just the norm this time of year, whenever Black Hat comes around there is an announcement of a massive data breach, who wouldn't want the free publicity.

Pierluigi Stella, chief technology officer at Network Box USA, a Houston-based security company had this to say about the breach, "I confess, I've become jaded — I no longer read such news. In fact, the more likely scenario is I go, 'Ah, another one." Maybe we are just getting used to these kinds of events, either way better change those passwords, better safe than sorry.

Written By: Sam Watkinson
Marketing Associate, TOSS C3

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