In what could be termed as the largest known theft of compromised internet data, the Russian hackers have stolen over a billion credentials of Internet users.
Hold Security of Milwaukee, a Wisconsin-based cybersecurity firm made the discovery of the largest online threat.
According to a New York Times report, the cybersecurity firm has found that a Russian crime ring has targeted tech companies’ websites from across the world to steal login data from 1.2 billion Internet users.
Hold Security said the Internet data was targeted by a crime ring in south central Russia.
The report said that the crime ring include less than a dozen men who are in their twenties.
According to NYT report, around 1.2 billion combinations of Internet user names and passwords and over 500 million email ids were stolen by the hackers.
The tech companies that have been attacked are both large and small.
Hold Security has denied to reveal the names of the 420,000 websites targeted by the hackers.
They, however, hinted that the breach hurted the information of both large tech firms and smaller and lesser known ones.
Even if the hackers targeted the companies across the globe, but the worst hit were Russian and US firms.
The attack on Russian companies has turned down the suspicion of involvement of the Russian government in the cyber crime, the newspaper reported.
“Hackers did not just target US companies, they targeted any website they could get, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to very small websites,” Alex Holden, the founder of Hold Security, was quoted as saying by NYT.


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