olympos Posted October 6, 2009 Report Share Posted October 6, 2009 Hi all, recently there was a huge email hack goin on, and i encourage every one here on TF to change the password of his private or business email address (I am not talking about your TF password!) immediately. CHANGE YOUR EMAIL AND MSN PASSWORD NOW and if you use the same passwords on social websites, of course you should change them there too!!! Ten thousands email addresses and their valid passwords have been displayed on internet since last thursday (perhaps only a small portion of the entire hack list was published). hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol, comcast, earthlink, netscape, sbcglobal, bigpond, optusnet and many more, any endings such as com, org, edu, co.uk, com.au, co.nz as well as email addresses from private domains have been published together with their passwords and are still visible NOW on google-cache... The source of the leak could be any social website as well as one of those "who-blocked-me on-msn" websites. This was posted at another forum today: I am one of those whose (yahoo) email accounts was abused this weekend. A Chinese electronics retailer, Coucoo.com, somehow used my account to send an email as if from me recommending their site, to everyone on my address list. Others have described the same email. I am neither stupid nor naive. I can spot a phishing email a mile off. I delete emails without opening them if I don't recognise the sender - I have missed one or two pleasant invitations as a result. To my knowledge I have never entered my details on a dodgy website. I have done a huge amount of online shopping over the years, but the goods I've bought have always arrived, so I guess the sites I used must have been bona fide. My partner is a software whizz and is as puzzled as I am about how this has happened. He has checked my computer for malware - none was found. The strange thing about the emails sent from my account was that they were sent in batches of 10, whereas my contacts are organised in batches of 25: so it looks as if my account was infiltrated by some software rather than someone sitting down with my password. Maybe someone should contact coucoo.com and ask them how they did it. greetings to all TFler! :wink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
olympos Posted October 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted October 6, 2009 POSTED ONE HOUR AGO AT http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/consumer&id=7051036 Thousands of e-mail accounts have been compromised. Microsoft, Google and AOL all report accounts have been accessed by hackers. More than 30,000 user names and passwords were posted on a site used by technology experts last week. The data has since been removed. The companies say it was part of a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers. The e-mail providers say security on their servers was not compromised. The companies are urging anyone with a Hotmail, MSN, G-mail or AOL e-mail to change their password. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
olympos Posted October 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted October 6, 2009 @admin: Rob, with all the email addresses and passwords still public displayed on the internet i could boost TF now to 100,000 members sharp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
olympos Posted October 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted October 7, 2009 http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/173236/a_look_at_stolen_hotmail_data_finds_simple_passwords.html 1234567 may not be a very secure password, but it's popular on Hotmail. That's according to Bogdan Calin, a security researcher who got hold of 10,000 stolen Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords that were posted to the Web site PasteBin late last week. Other Web mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL have also been hit by the phishers, according to the BBC, which reported that it had seen a total of 20,000 accounts, half of which were the same ones that Calin analyzed. After taking a look at the passwords, the security researcher found that two very weak passwords -- 123456 and 123456789 -- were the most common ones used by the victims. Of the 9,843 valid passwords he found, 82 of them used one of these two combinations. 12345678, 1234567 and 111111 also made the top 10 most common passwords. Also popular were first names such as alejandra, alberto, and alejandro (based on the names, Calin believes that the passwords were stolen by a phishing kit targeting Latinos). "A big majority of internet users still use very poor passwords," he wrote in a blog posting about his findings, a conclusion echoed by others who have examined similar data in the past. Security experts say that the secure passwords should use a combination of letters numbers and other characters, and not include things like names, dates or dictionary words. Calin found that just 6 percent of the Hotmail passwords contained a mix of letters, numbers and other characters. More than 60 percent were either lower case letters only, or numbers. The longest password he found: lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo. The top 10 passwords were: 1. 123456 2. 123456789 3. alejandra 4. 111111 5. alberto 6. tequiero 7. alejandro 8. 12345678 9. 1234567 10. estrella Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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