Criminals offer 617 million accounts from 16 cracked sites via darknet

Criminals are offering accounts for sale from 16 hacked sites on the Tor network through Dream Market. This concerns a total of 617 million accounts and mostly recent data. 500px, among others, confirms that 15 million users have been affected.

The British website The Register is in contact with the seller of the accounts and has published a list of all affected websites. Also, the website has seen samples from the databases and verified them with some of the companies involved.

The information in the databases usually consists of names, e-mail addresses and passwords. Those passwords are hashed or encrypted, but the strength of that encryption differs depending on the database. The accounts are sold per website, for all in all the seller would ask about 5.5 bitcoins, at the time of writing that is about 17,500 euros.

It seems to be fairly recent data, which was mostly captured in 2018. There are often large numbers of accounts for sale on the darknet, but often this concerns information from hacks that have taken place before. One of the affected websites, 500px, confirmed to The Register that a hack took place in 2018 and is now notifying its users. Some of the passwords in the 500px database are hashed with md5 and are therefore relatively easy to crack.

Other websites, such as MyHeritage, MyFitnessPal and Animoto, were already known to have stolen user data. However, according to the seller, it is the first time that the data is being offered for sale. The seller claims to have obtained the databases with accounts from the various companies on his own, by exploiting vulnerabilities in websites.