200 Million Data of Yahoo Users Posted on the Dark Web for Sale

An infamous cybercriminal is marketing 200 million credentials on the dark web believed to be of Yahoo users, and the company has confirmed that it is aware of hacker's claims, although they have not confirmed or denied authenticity of the data.

Peace, the hacker, listed supposed credentials of yahoo users on The Real Deal marketplace on Monday, has sold dumps of Myspace and Linkedln before. Peace told Motherboard that he has been trading the data confidentially for some time but now only decided to sell it openly.

The supposed leak comes following the other "mega breaches" in Linkedln and Myspace that records of many customers are compromised by each, and are uploaded by same cybercriminal.

As per the data sample, it contains hashed passwords, usernames, date of birth, and back-up email addresses in few cases. As per Peace, the data has been sold for 3 bitcoins, or approximately $1,860, and believed to be containing up to 200 million records from "2012 most likely". Motherboard.vice.com posted on August 1st, 2016, stating that till the time Yahoo confirms a breach or the whole set of data is released for verification, it is possible that the data is collated and repackaged from other major leaks of data.

A spokesperson of Yahoo sent email to IBTimes UK saying: "We are aware of a claim. We are committed to protecting the security of our users' information and we take any such claim very seriously. Our security team is working to determine the facts".

The mail further mentioned that Yahoo works really hard for ensuring its users security. They always recommend their users to generate a password that is strong, or altogether use the Yahoo Account Key for giving up the passwords and further suggest using dissimilar passwords for various platforms.

The reason behind their approach is simple and the massive media coverage has boosted the sales of Peace. One of those sellers has confessed to your reporter that Peace has earned approximate $50,000 just from the Linkedln breach. If confirmed, the Yahoo breach will surely bring the same attention from the media like other breaches and will certainly help Peace to earn more than $100,000 within only two-three months.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/5/2016