Data from 98 million accounts of Russian portal are online after hack

The Russian site Rambler appears to have been the target of a hack in 2012. The details of nearly 100 million accounts of the portal, search engine and webmail provider have appeared online. The passwords were stored in plain text.

It concerns e-mail addresses, passwords and ICQ numbers of a total of 98,167,935 accounts, which were stolen during a hack on February 17, 2012. The email addresses consist of the account names, followed by @rambler.ru. Because the passwords were stored unencrypted, LeakedSource was able to compile a list of the most commonly used passwords.

Particularly simple passwords such as ‘asdasd’, ‘123456’ and ‘000000’ proved popular. This is often the case, indicating not only bad password usage, but also the possibility that in many cases these are throwaway accounts.

LeakedSource received the stolen dataset through the same contact who reported the Last.fm hack to the site. The hack is the umpteenth in a series. Many major hacks took place years ago, but are only now becoming known.