Russian email firm doubts legitimacy of 272M ‘stolen’ credentials

Victor Barreiro Jr.

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Russian email firm doubts legitimacy of 272M ‘stolen’ credentials
None of the 57 million email-and-password combinations reportedly taken from Mail.ru actually work

MANILA, Philippines – Russian email provider Mail.ru is casting doubt on the authenticity of the 272 million “stolen” email credentials reported by Reuters on Thursday, May 5.

Motherboard reported that the 57 million emails reportedly taken from Mail.ru were made up of email and password combinations that did not work. 

Alex Holden, Hold Security’s founder, also clarified that the data appeared to be a “collection of different breaches.”

The hacker also appeared to be inflating the value of his trove of stolen credentials. While the hacker originally passed 1.17 billion credentials to Hold Security, only 272 million were unique. Of those, only 42 million were credentials Hold Security hadn’t seen before.

According to Holden, it was more likely the collection of credentials was an accumulation of older data breaches, picked up and sold for easy money – in this case, $1.

While data breaches are likely the norm in terms of cybersecurity, there’s still a hierarchy of importance. Some data breaches may not even be real data breaches, meaning, not every data breach is equal in the eyes of cybersecurity experts. – Rappler.com

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Victor Barreiro Jr.

Victor Barreiro Jr is part of Rappler's Central Desk. An avid patron of role-playing games and science fiction and fantasy shows, he also yearns to do good in the world, and hopes his work with Rappler helps to increase the good that's out there.