Today, online experts overflow from your computer's USB and find them advising on every corner of the internet. It's not bad, and beginners are at perhaps the same rates. The bad thing in this story is that there are some who exploit their knowledge to make every possible profit.
The methods vary. We have seen "services" of any kind that charge by the hour and the results are not always the desired, security software development companies that release software that only does not offer security.
But in the above examples, although the "experts" try to hide behind fancy titles and big promises, they are revealed relatively quickly, by negative reviews that flood technological forums.
Below we will see a different kind of specialists, who though they are experts try to get as much as possible from users who do not judge and do not question what they serve through each website.
We'll talk about German Hasso-Plattner-Institute. German Institute experts examined about 1 billion user accounts (much work on a very large sample) and concluded that 20% of users are reusing their passwords. In addition, 27% of users use the same passwords in all their accounts.
The Institute's researchers, as we mentioned above, analyzed about 1 billion user accounts from data generated by 31 different leakages either from the attackers themselves or from the data buyers.
The sites that "lost" the data? Yahoo, Dailymotion, VK, MySpace, Friend Finder Network, and Brazzers.
Approximately 68,5 million email addresses are displayed multiple times in the database, a figure corresponding to 20% (approximately) of all user accounts that were in the researchers' data.
The most common codes were found to be: "123456", "123456789", "111111", "qwerty", and "12345678" according to study. So far nothing out of the ordinary.
In the next step and after one information which is capable of terrifying many the Institute offers the opportunity to all interested parties to verify if their code is circulating on the internet.
What good people…
How can this happen; If you give your e-mail to the form on the page that reports the survey of the institute, you will be sent an e-mail with the information on the database (if any).
What do they earn in this way? Of course valuable e-mail addresses. In this case, you can be assured that all addresses are collected because you are sent an email with the information you request.
In this way the Institute will collect thousands of e-mails, and if it promotes its "product" properly, it will reach millions. Note that the e-mails that the experts will collect will not be just those that have already been leaked through a hack. The German Institute will also get addresses from those who are not at risk but think it would be good to find out…
What is the value of these e-mails? Without too much analysis, all these e-mails have one thing in common: They come from people they care about online security. How much can a company with security products pay for these addresses?
What could you do? Change your password if you are on one of the above sites. So you will not give your e-mail.
The press release announcing the results of the study is available at the link below.
http://www.presseportal.de/pm/22537/3503172
