There is probably a very good reason why the Russian hacker wanted to sell 272 millions email credentials from popular email services for less than $1.
The reason:
Millions of accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and the Russian Mail.ru email service appear to be false.
"The team security We have investigated the issue and we do not believe there is any risk to our users," a Yahoo spokesperson told Tech Insider.
The largest number of leaked accounts are supposed to be from Mail.ru. Without the double registrations data leaked by the company in question add up to around 57 million accounts, or to put it another way the number is more than half the number of people who use Russia's leading email service.
But a representative of Mail.ru rejected the hacked claim baseof data and said it was nothing more than a publicity stunt by Alex Holden of Hold Security, the researcher who uncovered the leak.
“The analysis shows that 99.982% of the credentials from Mail.Ru accounts found in the database are invalid. The database is very likely a collection of some old data dumps collected by hacking online services, ”said company spokeswoman Madina Tayupova.
"Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the sole purpose of the leak announcement was to launch a media campaign and to draw public attention to Hold Security's security operations."
A relative publication in the Motherboard states that Holden refused to share the data to check the e-mail the journalists. When asked about Mail.ru's response, Holden said:
“Mail.ru provides access to email services and their users use mail.ru's email addresses as unique identities to services other than mail.ru (eg social media). I don't think hackers have stolen the data from mail.ru but from the services that mail.ru users use their email addresses. ”
SA: OK ... you say okay, don't worry.
