FBI seeks hacker after 1.2 billion logins have been stolen
25 November 2015
FBI connects hacker to 1.2 billion stolen internet credentials - the biggest heist of this kind.
According to the Reuters news agency, court documents that were filed by the bureau during the last fiscal year name hacker identified as "mr.grey".
The hacker was linked through an Russian email address to the stolen logins.
"mr.grey," previously advertised credentials to Twitter and Facebook accounts for sale on the internet.
It was the American cyber security firm Hold Security that initially reported the theft of the credentials as well as 500 million additional email addresses last year.
According to Hold Security, CyberVor, the Russian crime ring that stole the data was responsible for hacking more than 420,000 websites.
In August, the company stated that, "To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials, ultimately having the largest collection of stolen personal data, totalling over 1.2 billion unique sets of passwords and e-mails."
Hold Security began to market a "breach notification" service to users who were concerned about their personal information being compromised, at $120 (PS71) per monthly.
Botnet breach
No matter who the perpetrator of CyberVor's breach is, the method used was a departure from way botnets (large networks of computers that are connected maliciously) are utilized according to Dave Palmer of Darktrace, director of technology.
"What's interesting about this is botnets are typically employed to leverage their huge size to target a specific victim - for example, taking computer games consoles down during Christmas, for instance." he told the BBC.
"It's instead been used as a massive scanner scanning websites all around the world to find weaknesses."
Mr. Nici's blog Palmer stated that the weaknesses that allowed computers to be used to create botnets, as well as the flaws in websites that meant login details could be hacked were preventable.
"We're still getting caught out by these attacks," he said.
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