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Hackers harvest 8.4 billion passwords
Hackers released data on 8.4 billion passwords this week and posted the information online. This might be the largest dump of passwords online ever.
Surprisingly, this is not making many headlines in the mainstream media.
Published June 8, 2021 – BGR MSN reported:
This news comes via the team at CyberNews, which reports that a 100GB text file containing a staggering 8.4 billion password entries was just leaked on a popular hacker forum. This data set presumably combines passwords stolen via previous data breaches and leaks, and it’s been dubbed the “RockYou2020” password leak on that hacker forum. That name was apparently chosen, per CyberNews, as a nod to the RockYou data breach from back in 2009, “when threat actors hacked their way into the social app website’s servers and got their hands on more than 32 million user passwords stored in plain text.”
If you’re reading these words, suffice it to say you probably need to change your passwords. Today, even. That’s because this new password leak is comparable in scale to the so-called “Compilation of Many Breaches,” or COMB, that we wrote about earlier this year. That previous compilation was essentially a giant database of more than 3.2 billion email-and-password pairings based on existing data that had been stolen as part of previous breaches and leaks from companies like Netflix and LinkedIn.
This new leaked password dataset, of course, is more than double that previous collection. And when you stop and consider that there are more than 7 billion people in the world, this means that there’s a strong likelihood that one of your myriad passwords is very likely caught up in this leak. CyberNews is recommending that anyone who wants to check and see if their passwords are included in this dataset should visit the CyberNews personal data leak checker or the leaked password checker, where password entries from the RockYou2021 compilation are being uploaded.
“By combining 8.4 billion unique password variations with other breach compilations that include usernames and email addresses, threat actors can use the RockYou2021 collection to mount password dictionary and password spraying attacks against untold numbers of online accounts,” CyberNews notes.
Who is Anonymous?: Cyberwar to continue
Forbidden Knowledge TV | Jul 24, 2016 | Alexandra Bruce
Watch the video above
With all of this talk about hackers and hacking, I thought it would be apt to take a peek at the mindset of hackers like Guccifer, who claims to be behind the DNC hack and to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s server from behind bars at the Alexandria City Jail, where he was extradited from Romania for 18 months and is awaiting sentencing. Apparently, he is encouraged to have access to a computer while in custody, from where his blog is ostensibly being published. (Some claim that this first Guccifer is the man currently in custody, whereas, Guccifer 2.0 is someone else and that both, based on linguistic analyses of chats are not native Romanian speakers but instead Russian. This investigation is ongoing).
This short documentary by VICELAND interviews past and present members of the hacktivist group Anonymous, who are or were willing to risk prison time and all that this entails, to fight for our freedom, as they see it.
As former Anonymous hacker, Mercedes Haefer says here of her involvement in the infamous take-down the websites of PayPal, VISA and MasterCard, in protest over these companies’ refusal to process payments for WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, “I don’t like him as a person but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have rights and that I won’t fight for his rights – because, if he doesn’t have rights, then I don’t have rights. [Either] everybody has them or they’re just privileges.”
A string of arrests have caused many in the original Anonymous group to retire from their hacktivism. Several former members interviewed here served time and all say that they’d do it all over again.
Canadian hacker, “Bio”, who has not yet been caught is looking at indefinite detention as a “Terrorist” for temporarily taking down a government website, as part of Op Cyber Privacy, in protest over the Anti-Terrorist Bill C-51, which gives the government broader surveillance powers, sparking concerns of privacy abuse.
When asked if he will continue his DDoS attacks, Bio replies, “It depends on what they do with the Bill. It needs to be repealed.” Bio estimates that the likelihood that he will go to jail is “pretty high”, saying that he knew from the start that it would end one of two ways: “Us in prison or we’d win,” but he maintains, “Anonymous, as a whole will always exist.
“Anonymous is an idea. You can’t kill or jail it.”
Cairns News 