Posts Tagged with "news"

In 2016-2017 pretty much all media were talking about hacking that happened during the US presidential campaign (did it actually happened or not - that's a different story). You can see many articles in the Internet and in paper books about how it is important to have a strong password. Seems like everybody should know this now. However, security professionals regularly meet passwords that are ridiculously unsafe.

Guys from Keeper Security, authors of the Keeper Password Manager, have compiled a list of the most commonly used passwords involved in data breaches in 2016. According to this blog post, these unsafe passwords are using in about 50% of 10 million password that were analyzed! Mostly, there are no surprises. People still use passwords like "password", "123456", "qwerty", etc.  Nevertheless, there are some interesting examples such as  “18atcskd2w” and “3rjs1la7qe”. Those passwords seem relatively strong, right? It seems like those passwords were created by bots for spam or flood activities and those passwords were used over and over in different sites.

There was an interesting news just in the end of January 2017.

On January 31th, 2017 Gitlab accidentally deleted their production database (git repositories were not affected though). 

What happened. For some reason, replicatation started lagging (PostgreSQL). One of the Gitlab employee some tried to fix the problem by playing with different settings but it did not help. Then, at some point, that employee decided to delete everything and rebuld the replica again. He (or she) tried to delete the folder with the replica data, but mixed up servers and removed the folder on the master (rm -rf on did db1.cluster.gitlab.com instead db2.cluster.gitlab.com).

It could have been not as bad but they realised they had no backups:

News agencies reported yesterday and today that a group of Russian hackers has stolen a huge number (1.2 billion!) of usernames and passwords using a botnet. This is apparently could be the largest collection of stolen user credentials in the history (if this fact is actually truth).

According to the news, the theft was discovered by an american security company called Hold Security. They did not disclose exactly what web sites have been attacked, but it was mentioned that it is a number of websites from small to big ones.

I am scratching my head trying to understand two things: 1) How did they discover this theft? 2) How do they know that it was Russian group of hackers?