Alleged Massive Account and Password Seizure By Russian Group

New submitter Rigodi (1000552) writes "The New York Times reported on August 5th that a massive collection of stolen email passwords and website accounts have been accumulated by an alleged Russian "crime ring". Over 1.2 billion accounts were compromised ... the attack scheme is essentially the old and well known SQL injection tactic using a botnet. The Information has been made public to coincide with the Blackhat conference to cause a debate about the classic security account and password system weaknesses, urging the industry to find new ways to perform authentication. What do Black Hat security conference participants have to say about that in Vegas?

Comments

Hold on a second..

[jbmartin6]

Of course, the company which reveals this offers a $120/month breach notification service so they have a strong incentive to exaggerate. I'm not saying we should immediately discount these claims but let's make sure our grain of salt is in there.

Re:big whoop

[wonkey_monkey]

a) Because hacking isn't just a case of having access to everything or nothing. What if you can only hack the password database, but you can't hack the system that those logins are used for?

b) Because, lazy as people are, you now have some very likely candidate email/password combinations to try on all the systems you can't hack into.