Topface Faces Hackers’ Wrath – Reportedly about 20million usernames of the popular Russian Dating Site hacked.
Approximately 20million user IDs and email addresses of visitors on Topface, a Russian online dating website, got hacked and are being offered for sale on another website. The apparent hack attack was detected by the renowned fraud-detection-software-maker company Easy Solutions INC.
The chief technology officer at Easy Solutions Daniel Ingevaldson published an official statement about the Topface breach.
Topface is a popular dating website comprising of 90million plus registered users.
The fraud, revealed Ingevaldson, got detected after his team identified a posting on an online forum (used often by cybercriminals) by the thief under the nickname “Mastermind”
In an exclusive conversation with “Mastermind” hacker, Hacked-DB was told that:
“No personal details has been fetched from TF except emails. So NO passwords or anything that could harm users. Sorry but I’m not gonna share the db with anyone. The goal of the show off was raise awareness about online dating scams because these dating sites (yes, all of ’em) using fake profiles to deceive the visitors … and we’re talking about millions (!) of fake profiles which is outrageous.”
Dmitry Filatov, chief executive officer at Topface, issued a statement informing the media that no proof of the breach has been found yet and thus, the claims of the St. Petersburg based firm cannot be ratified.
In a bid to reassure perplexed users of Topface, Filatoy said that about 90% of the total users on this website log on via their social network accounts such as Facebook and therefore, it is impossible for Topface to access their passwords and store crucial security related information like payment data.
“We are pretty sure that our users will not have any problems even if any data was stolen from our service,” states Filatoy.
However, Ingevaldson in a phone interview stated that it is possible for hackers to utilize stolen credentials to access bank accounts or health records and similar sort of sensitive data.
This is a Tier-One Breach– Ingevaldson
“These aren’t credit cards, but this is a tier-one breach. These credentials are like the iron ore of the cybercrime industry.”
Furthermore, Ingevaldson stated that these types of personal data get quickly sold to fraudsters who then use automated software to access website where the same data was used. 50% of the user credentials belong to Russians and 40% are from European region. Altogether about 20million users have used these email addresses at 345,000 distinct domains. For instance, out of the 20million, 7million users logged in to Topface using Hotmail.com whereas 2.5million from Yahoo.com and 2.3million from Gmail.com.
Popular websites are being targeted by hackers for the sake of stealing user names and passwords. The information is later used to access the users’ electronic-payment and cellphone accounts.
Yandex NV and Mail.ru Group Ltd., two of Russia’s largest Internet firms, last year reported about leak of millions of user accounts.
Topface was founded by Filatoy in 2011. This website is although free however, users need to pay for getting their profiles highlighted and publicized on the site. The CEO informed that this dating service is in close competition with other such websites including Badoo, Mamba and Tinder.
