Two million Google, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts compromised by hackers
The private information for over two million accounts on Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn accounts could have been stolen in a month-long attack by hackers.
Facebook accounted for around 57 per cent of the hacked accounts, followed by Yahoo (10 per cent), Google (nine per cent) and Twitter (three per cent).
Trustwave, a web security firm which has since recovered the information, said “it is not the result of any weakness in those company networks” but that Pony malware on the victims' computers had been used to scrape login usernames and passwords from their web browsers. That data was then sent on to a server controlled by the hackers.
"Individual users had the malware installed on their machines and had their passwords stolen,” said Abby Ross, a spokesperson for Trustwave, before explaining that the malware came from two Russian-speaking social networking sites (vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru).
"The malware was configured so that the majority of the credential information was sent to a server in the Netherlands," Ross told Mashable. "The server does not show from which countries the information came from so we cannot break down exactly how many users from each country were affected. However, we can confirm the attackers targeted users worldwide including in the US, Germany, Singapore, Thailand and others."
While the stolen information has not been publicly posted online the social media networks involved have taken steps to inform individuals and reset their passwords.