Russia’s Mail.Ru Group sees no active hacked passwords so far

MOSCOW, May 5 (PRIME) -- First checks of allegedly hacked accounts of the e-mail service of Russian Internet giant Mail.Ru Group have revealed no passwords to active e-mails, the company said in a statement seen by PRIME on Thursday.

“The study of the first random choice showed that it does not contain any passwords to active accounts. It is also of importance that the base contains a great deal of identical logins with various passwords that points to the fact that it was compiled from fragments of various bases, where users exploited their e-mails as logins,” the company said.

“We continue checking the base and as soon as we have more information, we will warn the users who could suffer any damages.”

Reuters reported late Wednesday that hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for e-mail accounts and other Web sites are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld, and the discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included the majority of users of Mail.Ru Group’s e-mail service.

Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, told Reuters that

smaller fractions of hacked e-mails were of services of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

The latest discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up totaling 1.17 billion records, Reuters reported.

After eliminating duplicates, Holden said, the cache contained nearly 57 million Mail.Ru accounts, a big chunk of the 64 million monthly active e-mail users Mail.Ru said it had at the end of last year.

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