2013 breach at Russian cybercrime forum resurfaces with millions of victims' credentials
A 2013 breach of Russian-language cybercrime forum YouHack exposed its members' login details – and millions of credentials they had posted about other victims, according to newly cataloged data.
Key points
- You might expect members of a cybercrime forum to know better than to reuse passwords or register with an email address tied to their real identity.
- It said the 2023 breach of Russian bank Sberbank's loyalty program (SberSpasibo) contained records belonging to 48 million users.
- Reporting on the SberSpasibo breach at the time suggested the records were dated between April 2017 and February 2022, and the attack was claimed by the pro-Ukraine hacktivist outfit NLB.
YouHack, a longtime cybercrime forum, moved to a different domain after the 2013 breach and remains active, giving cybercrims a place to trade stolen credentials and financial data.
Millions more HIBP separately published its findings concerning another Russian data breach today.
Additional details
- Around 107,000 belonged to forum members, whose exposed data included usernames, IP addresses, and mostly unsalted MD5 password hashes.
- The data collated from that digital burglary was eventually bundled into 2024's so-called Mother of all Breaches – a 12TB, 26 billion-record mega-dump of files taken from myriad data security lapses.
- Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) added the breach on Wednesday, recording 7.2 million unique email addresses.
- NLB also claimed responsibility for an attack on Sberbank's internal systems at the same time, and later took partial credit for an attack on Alfa-Bank, Russia's largest private bank.
- Bank card numbers were stored as unsalted SHA-1 hashes, which could let attackers test possible numbers against the leaked hashes for a match.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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