Russian Hackers Publish Passwords To Nearly 5 Million Email Accounts

Posted on 11 September 2014 at 00:46

A user of a Russian cryptocurrency forum has published a list of nearly 5 million email accounts and their passwords.

The Daily Dot reports that a forum poster, known as "tvskit," posted a list of 4,930,000 email addresses and passwords on Russian Bitcoin forum BTCsec. It was claimed that around 60% of the passwords were valid, although forum administrators quickly removed the file and redacted the passwords.

BTCsec

A screenshot of the email hoard.

Some forum users who viewed the unredacted list claimed that the passwords shown were about 10 years out of date. Other accounts shown have been suspended or deactivated for years.

Along with Gmail accounts, the list also included email addresses for Yandex, the Russian search engine. The affected Gmail accounts are reported to come from English, Russian, and Spanish-speaking nations.

Representatives from Google and Yandex explained to CNews that the list of email addresses was created by combining lists of compromised email addresses from previous years, and that no new accounts had been compromised.