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Showing posts from July, 2016

Cracking the MySpace List - First Impressions

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Alt Title: An Embarrassment of Riches Backstory: Sometime around 2008, a hacker or disgruntled employee managed to break into MySpace and steal all the usernames, e-mails, and passwords from the social networking site. This included information covering more than 360 million accounts. Who knows what else they stole or did, but for the purposes of this post I'll be focusing only on the account info. For excellent coverage of why the dataset appears to be from 2008 let me refer you to the always superb Troy Hunt's blog post on the subject . Side note, most of my information about this leak also comes from Troy's coverage. This dataset has been floating around the underground crime markets since then, but didn't gain widespread notoriety until May 2016 when an advertisement offering it for sale was posted to the "Real Deal" dark market website. Then on July 1st, 2016, another researcher managed to obtain a copy and then posted a public torrent of then entir