vKontakte hacked!

Periodically, there are news that a social network has been hacked. This time, Motherboard website reported that the most popular Russian social network was hacked by a hacker with the nickname Peace_of_mind (Peace). This time, 171,000,000 (171 million) user account data was stolen. His "success", he put up for sale.

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The hacker decided to sell his work on the darknet (the shadow part of the Internet, accessible only through special browsers). At the price he appointed 1 bitcoint (Internet currency, which is approximately 520 €). It is not the first time that this hacker has put up for sale data on hundreds of millions of LinkedIn, MySpace and Tumblr accounts, etc.

According to the site LeakedSource - 92 out of 100 verified email addresses belong to active users of the social network.

As you can see, Hacker posted 100,000,000 accounts, and he left 71 million more VKontakte in reserve. He does not intend to sell them yet.

According to the VKontakte administration, these are old plums, which painstakingly gathered by hackers in 2011 and 2012, and that most passwords from hacked users are no longer active. Is this genuine information or is it an attempt to reduce the problem ?! Check random accounts, puts this information under doubt, because under most of the hacked accounts you can still log in. So a representative of the Motherboard said that the user "VKontakte", who contacted the publication, confirmed that the password posted by the hacker really allows you to go to his page.

Base cracked data takes about 17 gigabytes. Contains in open form not only email addresses and passwords, but also other personal data, such as last names, first names and phone numbers of users.

As always, it’s hard to say whether someone will use your account, but it’s still worth changing the password.

On the site www.leakedsource.com you can see the sites where, according to the research portal of hacking, your email is lit. To take to heart, the data on this site is not worth it, but if the site gave you the date of the "lit" e-mail and after this date, you did not change the password - it is better to change.

What you need to do to the probability of hacking would be less:

Create a complex password. To make your password more difficult to choose, always use at least 1 capital letter, 1 small letter and 1 number in the password (for example, Sekretniy89).

If possible, use dual authorization by mobile number or email.

Set on the page a notice of entry into your account.

Change the password periodically.

Use different passwords for different types of sites. For example, 1 - for forums and sites without personal data. 2 - for sites with personal data. 3rd for sites with your credit card details. 4th for the banks of the country.

To make it easier to remember passwords - create an association with the site. So, for example, for VK.com you can create a password “MoyParol777VK”, and for mail “MoyParol777Mail”.

And, of course, NEVER! NEVER! And once more NEVER! If you are not able to recognize “harmful” links, do not open links and applications in the mail / social network, if you do not expect them, EVEN if they came from a friend. It is better to ask the sender "is it really from him".

The most popular passwords, according to Leaked Source, are used by users, but obviously you should not do this (never use these passwords).