It looks like a computer hacker who goes by the moniker “mr.grey” has made him or herself a wanted person by the FBI. The offence? “mr. grey” has made off with login information for more than 1.2 billion online accounts. Apparently, this particular hacker has been linked to numerous stolen logins via a Russian email address.
American cyber security firm Hold Security shared, “To the best of our knowledge, they mostly focused on stealing credentials, eventually ending up with the largest cache of stolen personal information, totaling over 1.2 billion unique sets of e-mails and passwords.”
Hold Security also mentioned that the Russian crime ring known as Cybervor is the one behind such a huge scale data theft, having amassed a list of breaching over 420,000 websites. These accounts were said to have been hacked via botnets, which are large networks of computers that have been linked together in order to collectively carry out malicious activity on such a massive scale.
Such botnets were normally employed to attack an individual target, but it looks like a different way of thinking sees them being used as a massive scanner to scan websites all around the world, probing said websites for weaknesses. Hopefully mr. grey can be apprehended, and not a moment too soon!
Filed in . Read more about Hacking and Social Hit. Source: washington.cbslocal