We recently reported news, via Neowin, of how a number of Hotmail login details had been leaked and posted to text/code sharing tool Pastebin.com.
We have since learned that Pastebin is in fact constantly being used to share emails and passwords, and believe it or not, its not hotmail emails accounts. The right Google search will pull up a number of Pastebin URL’s full of thousands of hotmail, yahoo and gmail email addresses and password. I found three in a matter of minutes and each had at least 5 active accounts, i.e. accounts that I could actually access with the passwords given.
This isn’t just a hotmail problem nor a pastebin.com one, there seems to a community of hackers and phishers using tools like pastebin to share email accounts and passwords. We recently unconvered another list, shared on anonymous social site 4chan that held thousands of usernames and logins. This lead to a mass hacking of various Facebook, MySpace, Paypal and yes, email accounts.
Oh and don’t believe these lists are out there, here’s a blurred screenshot:
The passwords in your blurred screenshot are unique enough to quickly let people find the pastebin post, so you didn’t have to blur the username part of the email address really..
Did you come across this?
http://scr.im/
They claim, this is one way to safely exchange your email. You don’t have to put out your email in the open with all those parenthesis and stuff like that and you do not have to spell it out either.
Try it!
Anil Atluri – Impeccably authentic freelance content provider
Logical followup post to the hotmail post.. This info is not breakig news. Almost anything can be found with the right google query..
In other news today, the sun rose and the pope confirmed his religion as Catholic.
Hackers sharing passwords you say? Affecting lots of big name services? Really?
Now, if you’d some news of how these specific lists were obtained, and if that revealled something new and useful then it might count as news….
no it’s an important wake up call to be careful not to fall for phishing
It’s not news, BUT it’s an important reminder to strengthen your passwords because this stuff DOES happen. Thanks, Zee.
BREAKING NEWS: Gmail & Yahoo passwords published online!
http://thenextweb.com/2009/10/05/guess-code-sharing-web-services-share-emails-passwords-year/
Bank details are also being stolen in coordinated phishing attacks!
But anti-Microsoft stories are much more fashionable. It must be so cool to jump on the bandwagon.
thanks for visiting.
it is quite scary to know that there are such websites which facilitate the trading of such massive amount of personal data!
10,000 Windows Live Hotmail Account ID and Passwords Hacked</a
Here they published it(he,she) counts(tells) them of gmail and hotmail the keys http: // sharpitositios.tk/