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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Antichat Hacker Forum Breach Reveals Weak Passwords

Summary: A database purported to be the user records of Antichat.ru, a Russian-language hacker forum with more than 41,000 users since its founding nearly a decade earlier, was sent to KrebsOnSecurity and found to be a snapshot of user information and private messages from before June 2010, when the forum apparently suffered a compromise. An anti-spam source cracked 18,225 of the 41,037 passwords (44 percent) in about 18 days using an EVGA GTX 295 graphics card running Hashcat, with 567 users choosing "123456," 322 choosing "111111," and 65 choosing the single character "0."

What's compelling: The stolen passwords no longer open Antichat accounts because administrators now tie logins to the user's Internet address, but that same address data and the forum's private messages - some involving theft of personal and financial data - are now in the hands of whoever holds the database, including law enforcement investigators.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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