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How did Russian hackers get passwords for more than a billlion users?
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Aug 6, 2014
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How did Russian hackers get passwords for more than a billlion users?
It's the biggest computer hack of online passwords known so far, affecting more than one billion user names.
Photo of a hacked computer.
A criminal gang in Russia have gotten their hands on 1 billion passwords by hacking more than 400,000 websites.
(
alperer16/Flickr.com
)

It's the biggest computer hack of online passwords known so far, affecting more than one billion user names.

It's the biggest computer hack of online passwords known to date, affecting more than one billion user names.

Computer hackers in Russia have gotten their hands on the passwords from more than 400,000 websites — some of which, authorities say, are still vulnerable.

For more, we're joined by Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

According to Hold Security, which first reported the breach Tuesday:



"After more than seven months of research, Hold Security identified a Russian cyber gang which is currently in possession of the largest cache of stolen data. While the gang did not have a name, we dubbed it “CyberVor” (“vor” meaning “thief” in Russian).



The CyberVor gang amassed over 4.5 billion records, mostly consisting of stolen credentials. 1.2 billion of these credentials appear to be unique, belonging to over half a billion e-mail addresses. To get such an impressive number of credentials, the CyberVors robbed over 420,000 web and FTP sites."