Der Spiegel: German police in the city of Verden traced 18 million email addresses and their counterparts codeς accesss. The news comes just months after German authorities rediscovered 16 million credentials stolen by cybercriminals.
According to Der Spiegel (published in German), at least three of the 18 million usernames and passwords discovered are believed to belong to users from Germany. The number could be much higher, since many addresses end in .com, so the origin of the victim cannot be ascertained.
In contrast to the previous incident, where many of the passwords were old and had been changed by the owners, this time the data seems to be very recent. Verden authorities notified the country's Federal Information Security Service (BSI) of their findings.
The Der Spiegel has made an analysis of the incident within the article and has decided that this last event could be linked to the one in which 16 was found with millions of credentials.
In January, after 16 was revealed to millions of email addresses along with passwords, BSI created a new service in cooperation with Deutsche Telekom, Avira and other organizations to help users determine if their credentials were stolen.
Perhaps now with this big leak, BSI will launch another website or update the old one to include the new data provided by the Verden police.
See its publication Der Spiegel.
