171 million user accounts of Russian social networking site VK.com were leaked, selling at the price of only one bitcoin

A few days ago, the biggest social site of Europe VK.com was hacked and 171 million user accounts were leaked. The stolen database of VK.com contains complete usernames, email addresses and passwords in plain text. Many of the accounts include locations and phone numbers.

About VK.com

VK.com was founded in 2006 grown out of vkontakte.ru. Located in St. Petersburg, VK.com’s headquarter is the biggest social website similar to Facebook in Russian with over 350 million users. In initial stage, users were mainly from Russian-speaking country. Now it provides 70 kinds of language versions to serve global users like the domestic Kaixin.com and Renren.com.

It is reported that hackers have attacked this website as early as in the end of 2013 or the beginning of 2013 when VK had almost 190 million users. Therefore, this number could have been the amount of user information stolen by hackers. But there is no solid news about which hacker organization is responsible for this attack.

At present, this hacker organization has sold part of the accounts information in the online black market which involved 100 million user accounts with the capacity of 17 GB. Unbelievably, these hackers only asked one bitcoin for the data, which equals to about 580 dollars.

ZDNet verified the data at sale by entering these accounts in public search engine of VK site and found out many of them were valid accounts. By further verification, some account names turned out to be invalid. There is no response of some of the email address that they’ve made contact with for now.

LeakedSource (paid search engine for leaked data) has also obtained some of the database information. According to the data:

The most frequent passwords of VK.com users

The most commonly used email server of VK.com users

Up to now, there has been no comment from the VK website.

Article source: FreeBuf