2M Login Credentials Stolen

While searching for a topic for my blog this week, I found the article titled “Researchers discover database with 2M stolen login credentials” by Charlie Osborne.  The article is about 1.58 million stolen user names and passwords.  The accounts that were stolen were from various online services.  The breakout according to the article was 318,121 Facebook accounts, 21,708 Twitter accounts, 54,437 Google-based accounts and 59,549 Yahoo accounts.  There were also about 320,000 stolen email account information.  There were also stolen FTP, remote desktop and secure shell credentials.  97% of the credentials came from the Netherlands.   There were only 2000 of the accounts that were stolen that were from the US.  The article also revealed that the majority of the passwords were 123456, 12345678, 1234 and password.  All of the information was gathered by a botnet controller called Pony Botnet.  This type of botnet is a key logging malware that captures passwords and users names when users try to access certain account types.  The final statement of the article was “Will we ever learn?”.

The article made me think of the many people in my life that I have to supply free tech support to such as my parents, family friends and friends.  In almost all cases they only come to me for advice when they have  a problem.  The typical issue they present me with is the fact that they are all of a sudden getting multiple pop-ups on their computer or the computer is running extremely slow.  This is usually caused by them taking someone else’s advice and installing “great” software to do whatever useless function that was recommended to them.  This all results in me spending a couple of hours on their computer fixing things to just repeat in the near future.

Typically when I’m working on their computer and I ask them what the password is for something it is usually either the default password provided by the device manufacturer or it is something like their family name (which by the way is the same name of their router).  I encourage them to change it but they usually do not like what I suggest.  I’m told that it is too inconvenient to type all of those characters in when they want to add an occasional device.  I try to educate them as to the right thing to do but in the end even when I get them to change the password they still continue to make the same mistake over and over.

Although it is frustrating to deal with, I always figure that my expose to people outside of IT tells me that at least for the next few years that there will be lots of work available for people who know how to work on home computers.  Of course, most of the same people that I assist, have no idea how much IT support costs.  Either way, I’m surprised that more information like what this article revealed are exposed more frequently than they are.

Osborne, C. (Dec 4, 2013). Researchers discover database with 2M stolen login credentials Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57614479-83/researchers-discover-database-with-2m-stolen-login-credentials/