Hacker offers for sale a huge database of 272 million emails. The transaction is advertised through the Dark Web and its price is about $ 1.
An anonymous hacker of Russian origin, which goes online under the pseudonym "the Collector", was pointed out by the cyber security company Hold Security, that it sells 1,17 billion email accounts along with their passwords, through a Dark Web forum.
The stolen codes apparently came from some of the world's largest e-mail service providers, including Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft and Russian Mail.ru.
When the analysts security began negotiations with the hacker to verify the authenticity of this data, the Russian hacker only asked for 50 rubles (less than a dollar) in exchange for the entire database.
How much was humiliatingly small and so the company proceeded with the transaction and acquisition of the database. After analysis of the data Hold Security CEO Mr. Alex Holden said that a large number of the 1,17 billion codes turned out to be double and triple entries and that in fact the database contained only 272 million unique entries.
According to the report they drafted, 57 millions belong to Russia's leading provider Mail.ru, 40 millions in Yahoo accounts, 33 millions in Microsoft Hotmail accounts and 24 million Gmail accounts.
Also, of those 272 million passwords analyzed by Hold Security, about 42,5 million were new credentials that the company hadn't seen sold on the dark web before, meaning the list came from people who were still doing hacking on the Internet.
