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Over 2 million passwords stolen in malware attack

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

  • Updated:

Over two million passwords for Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! and LinkedIn accounts have been stolen. All the services are aware of the problem, and have reset affected accounts and notified owners.

This was not a breach of security for the various services – the attackers infected PCs in 92 companies with keylogging software. This malware records what’s typed into your keyboard, and then sends the data to the attackers. In this way, the following information was obtained.

Over 2 million passwords stolen in malware attack
  • 1.58 million site logins
  • 320,000 email logins
  • 41,000 FTP accounts
  • 3000 remote desktop logins
  • 3000 Secure Shell accounts

Most of the stolen data came from Facebook logins, followed by Yahoo!, Google and Twitter. The number of LinkedIn passwords stolen is significantly smaller. This malware attack was carried out by Dutch servers, and The Netherlands also tops the list of affected users – over one million Dutch accounts were hacked, followed by much smaller numbers in Thailand and Germany,

We reported last month how many people have passwords that are incredibly easy to steal. The recent theft of millions of Adobe passwords shed light on just how simple and guessable many passwords are. From ‘1234’ to ‘asdfg’ and ‘chocolate’, far too many people choose the same, really simple passwords.

If your computer is infected with malware, it doesn’t matter how strong your passwords are, but you’re always at risk if you have easy to guess login details.

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[Source: CNNMoney, Spiderlabs]

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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