Researchers identify the hacker behind the dump of 773million credentials

[The AchieVer]

Researchers identify the hacker behind the dump of 773million credentials 

 

 

Researchers identified the hacker behind a dump of 773million credentials after a meticulous investigation. It totalled over 900GB of data consisting of passwords, telephone number and addresses of individuals. This was likely to be from more than one source.

Recorded Future revealed the hacker’s name as “Corpz,” pseudonymised evidently to conceal their identity.

Recorded Futures’ Investigation and Findings

Upon investigating the dump data, Recorded Futures discovered C0rpz first distributed it. It is not however confident in the fact that C0rpz stole the data. The researchers further believed that C0rpz collected the data over three years as opposed to all at once. Its originality is not known but it is assumed the number of sources it was retrieved from was already leaked data. This could potentially render some of the credentials worthless as targeted organisations would have been obligated to notify victims to change or reset their passwords.

The mass data was dumped on hacking forums such as RAID where C0rpz additionally sold a custom-made brute-forcing tools. This was likely for account stuffing attacks.

The hacker divided the 12,000 files separately within a root folder, labelled “Collection#1.” The other folders, later discovered, contained 845 GB  worth of data. The data minimised, by removing duplicates, were released as Collection numbers 2-5. The publication of the data files go as far back as 2017 with the “ANTIPUBLIC #1” file.

The consequence of using sold data

Recorded Future note the data sold for free in a mega cloud service and on torrent trackers. It concluded that big data dumps will continue to happen across the dark web, where it can use it for a range of criminal activities such as identity theft and other fraudulent activities. Further hackings can result from the sold data such as phishing campaigns or use of passwords to gain access to IoT devices.

 

 

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[straycat19]

Having your email data in one of these databases is just a warning for you to change your passwords to it, if you haven't already done so.  My official email and logins require a password change every 90 days, but my personal email and logins I change every 6 months.  I use the same rules at home I have to follow at work,  that is a password can never be reused.  Both 1Password and KeePass have the ability to check all your passwords with HIBP password database, so if you use a password that is in the database you should change it.  That doesn't mean that the password was associated with one of your accounts, just that if someone were using a list of passwords made up from these releases that the password would be in the list.