A hacker who over the past weeks leaked tens of millions of accounts stolen from various popular services has now revealed that the Russian instant messaging service QIP (Quiet Internet Pager) also suffered a serious data breach several years ago.
According to breach notification service LeakedSource, hackers obtained the details of 33,383,392 users following an attack that took place in June 2011.
Consumer cybersecurity solutions provider HEROIC has analyzed the leaked data and determined that the compromised information dates back to 2009-2011 and includes email addresses, usernames and passwords. The passwords had been stored in plain text, making the information easy to misuse.
The security firm has confirmed that the leaked information is genuine after carrying out successful password reset attempts.
Nearly 10 million of the compromised accounts are associated with Mail.Ru email addresses, followed by Yandex (2.5 million), Rambler (2 million) and Gmail (925,000). Unsurprisingly, most of the passwords are 123456, 123123, 111111 and 123456789.
Given that the leaked data is old, it’s likely that many of the affected users have already changed their passwords. Nevertheless, recent incidents have shown that even credentials stolen several years ago can still be useful for password reuse attacks, such as the ones targeting Facebook, GitHub and Reddit.
The individual who disclosed the QIP.ru breach has also provided LeakedSource nearly 100 million accounts stolen from the Russian web portal Rambler. These are not the only mega breaches affecting Russia-based services. Recently, hackers also leaked 25 million accounts from Mail.ru and 100 million accounts from the social media network VK.
The list of organizations that suffered major data breaches in the past years also includes Last.fm (43 million), Dota (2 million), LinkedIn (167 million), Myspace (360 million), VerticalScope (45 million) and Tumblr (65 million). In most cases, the full extent of the incident was only made public in recent months.
Related: Dumps from Two More Bitcoin Breaches Disclosed by LeakedSource
Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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