Pierluigi Paganini
December 05, 2013
Two Million social media credentials stolen by cybercriminals have been found by security experts at Trustwave’s SpiderLabs, the collection includes popular social media like Facebook and Twitter and popular websites such as Google and Yahoo.
Trustwave’s SpiderLabs has published an intriguing blog post to describe the discovery made on a Netherlands-based Pony Botnet Controller Server.
The experts revealed to have had the access to the Administration panel of the botnet thanks to the knowledge acquired after the public disclosure of the Pony Version 1.9 source code. The Admin Panel provided to the researchers the statistics and database data.
The Pony Control Admin panel is written in Russian language, the researchers provided the statistics on stolen users’ credentials:
Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter and LinkedIn were most hit social media platforms, the list of domains also includes the Russian social networks vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru. The analysis of Geo-location statistics revealed that the cybercriminals concentrated their effort on the Netherlands, but Thailand, Germany, Singapore, and Indonesia were also seriously targeted.
As reported in the above graph the majority of the stolen passwords were not considerable sufficiently robust.The discovery is the confirmation of the great interest of cybercrime in the exploitation of social media for their illegal activities. The account could be sold on the underground by cybercriminals or could used to arrange a targeted attack (e.g.spear phishing, watering hole).
During the last RSA Europe security conference in Amsterdam, the cyberdefense specialist Aamir Lakhani, who works as a solutions architect at IT services provider World Wide Technology, made an interesting presentation on the abuse of LinkedIn network to launch an attack.
As reported in the blog post:
(Security Affairs – Cybercrime, stolen credentials)
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