This week in technology news, a company in Wisconsin named : Hold Security (famous for recovering loads of data from the hacking underworld); persuaded a hacker to get them a data base full of 272 million emails and passwords that people use to log on to different sites. The emails and such that the hacker obtained aren’t the key to everything that the person owns and to their own personal email, they were simply just emails and passwords that people used to log on to small websites like Facebook or Twitter.
The company was trying to find out how many people are using the same password for every site they have ever logged into, their banking account, Target.com account, and even their email. The company tried to thin out these people to show the world that they need to use different passwords for each and everything they sign up for, because if you’re one of those people, a hacker could get the information to one of you accounts and then get into every other account that you have.
In 2014, Hold Security, tried to do the same thing but this was after the company obtained over 1 billion hack login credentials, but the thing is when they tried their site crashed. The hacker Hold Security hired seem to have been targeting only Russian emails and logins and such since about 50 million or so of the emails obtained were from a well known Russian email provider: mail.ru.
The way the company obtained the hacker, who they call The Collector, is they found the hacker on a chat forum and he was bragging about he got 272 million logins on various sites and he was trying to sell them, but the owner of the company who speak fluent Russian messaged the hacker and explained to him that he would not be buying the logins but would give the hacker a vast amount of likes on various social media sites, and the hacker agreed.