Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
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."