Pierluigi Paganini
September 02, 2016
In June 2012, the online music service Last.fm was compromised by hackers, in response the company notified the incident to its users inviting them to change their passwords.
Some experts speculated the security breach took place several months earlier.
The company was using the MD5 hashing algorithm with no salt to protect passwords, which is known to be weak security implementation, for this reason, Last.fm also announced some improvements for the storage of the passwords.
“We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information posted online. As a precautionary measure, we’re asking all our users to change their passwords immediately.” states the Last.fm Password Security Update.
“We strongly recommend that your new Last.fm password is different to the password you use on other services.”
The real number of impacted users was not disclosed at the time of the data breach, but now we know more about the incident. According to the breach notification service LeakedSource roughly 43 million accounts were compromised in the incident.
The leaked records include usernames, passwords, email addresses, dates of registration and some other internal data.
“Music service Last.fm was hacked on March 22nd, 2012 for a total of 43,570,999 users. This data set was provided to us by [email protected] and Last.fm already knows about the breach but the data is just becoming public now like all the others.” reported LeakedSource.
“Each record contains a username, email address, password, join date, and some other internal data. We verified the legitimacy of this data set with Softpedia reporter Catalin C who was in the breach himself along with his colleagues.”
According to LeakedSource, its experts managed to crack 96 percent of the unsalted MD5 hashes within a couple of hours.
Below the top 10 passwords:
The revelation about the Last.fm data breach arrives a couple of days after Dropbox confirmed that hackers stole 68 million accounts in 2012.
Unfortunately, the list of data breaches is very long and includes other IT giants, such as LinkedIn, MySpace, VK.com and Tumblr.
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(Security Affairs –hacking, data breach)
