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You Can Now Browse Through 427 Millon Stolen MySpace Passwords (mashable.com)
Stan Schroeder, writing for Mashable:An anonymous hacker managed to obtain an enormous number of user credentials in June 2013 from fallen social networking giant MySpace -- some 427 million passwords, belonging to approx. 360 million users. In May 2016, a person started selling that database of passwords on the dark web. Now, the entire database is available online for free. Thomas White, security researcher also known by the moniker "Cthulhu," put the database up for download as a torrent file on his website, here. "The following contains the alleged data breach from Myspace dating back a few years. As always, I do not provide any guarantees with the file and I leave it down to you to use responsibly and for a productive purpose," he wrote. The file is 14.2 GB in size; downloading it might take some time. It is password-protected, but White made the password available on Twitter and his site.
What the heck is MySpace?
I think the bigger deal isn't the risk of unauthorized people accessing ancient unupdated MySpace pages. I think the bigger deal is that a lot of people are using the that same password, now disclosed online, for their email login, bank login, etc. And the MySpace leak gives everyone the ability to look up a large swath of the population's passwords. A lot of not very tech-savvy people had MySpace accounts, and I haven't looked at the file, but it seems that a less-than-honest person could match people to passwords in a lot of these cases and then have that person's passwords for a lot of different sites.