An anonymous hacker managed to obtain an enormous number of user credentials in June 2013 from fallen social networking giant MySpace — some 427 million passwords, belonging to approx. 360 million users. In May 2016, a person started selling that database of passwords on the dark web. Now, the entire database is available online for free.
Thomas White, security researcher also known by the moniker “Cthulhu,” put the database up for download as a torrent file on his website, here.
"The following contains the alleged data breach from Myspace dating back a few years. As always, I do not provide any guarantees with the file and I leave it down to you to use responsibly and for a productive purpose,” he wrote.
The file is 14.2 GB in size; downloading it might take some time. It is password-protected, but White made the password available on Twitter and his site. As always, you should exercise caution while downloading any file from an unverified source on the internet; at the very least, you should run it through a virus scanner before doing anything with it.
Besides security researchers, the data might be interesting to (likely former) MySpace users as well. While someone breaching your MySpace account might not be a big concern for many, finding that the password you used on MySpace is still active on another site you use should be reason enough to do a thorough check of the various passwords you use online, and change any duplicates you find.
As we wrote many times, reusing the same password on multiple sites leads to trouble — if one site gets compromised, a hacker might test out the same username/password combination on other sites. And if you used the same password on MySpace and, say, eBay or PayPal, a hacker armed with your credentials could actually cost you money.
A recent slew of Twitter hacks appear to be related to password dumps from other sites, such as LinkedIn. Mark Zuckerberg, David Guetta, Katy Perry and Evan Williams were hacked, among others.
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