620 million accounts available for sale on dark web

According to the British news website The Register, 620 million accounts from hacked websites are for sale on dark web. For less than $20.000 in Bitcoin, people can buy the stolen accounts on Dream Market, located in the Tor network. Criminals should also be able to buy the copied user data individually. The data comes from hacks from the years 2016 to 2018. Some were already known others now became acquianted.

Among the sixteen hacked websites are the video messaging application Dubsmash (162 million accounts), the diet and exercise app MyFitnessPal (151 million accounts) and the family-tree-tracking service MyHeritage (92million accounts).

As reported by The Register, the account records appear to be legit. The data leak contains e-mail addresses, names and passwords but it does not contain any bank or credit card information and the passwords are encrypted and must therefore be decoded before they can be used.

Depending on the affected side, there are also a few other categories of personal information such as social media authentication tokens. It can be expected that the vendees will use the data for credential stuffing attacks. In such attacks, attackers try out lists with email password pairs at various online services to hack accounts. These attacks are made possible because many users reuse the same password across many websites.

The seller told The Register that they possess one billion accounts in total and that their aim is to make “life easier” for hackers. The seller said “I don’t think I am deeply evil, I need the money. I need the leaks to be disclosed […] I’m just a tool used by the system. We all know measures are taken to prevent cyber attacks, but with these upcoming dumps, I’ll make hacking easier than ever.”

Update: 127 million more stolen accounts appeared a few days ago. Affected sites include architecture, interior and designe website Houzz (57 million records), live-video streaming site YouNow (40 million records) and travel booking site Ixigo (18 million records). This data is sold by the hacker for a total of $14,500 in Bitcoin.