Thursday, 5 March 2015

Security Researcher Made 10m Login Credentials Public

Security researcher Mark Burnett has published 10m passwords online alongside their associated usernames. However, his intentions are benign – the researcher has created his database in order to find a way to improve password security.

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Burnett announced he wanted to provide a clean set of password research to share with the world, even despite fears that he could be arrested for releasing such data. As evidence, the researcher referred to the case of journalist Barrett Brown, who posted a link in a chat room to a “data dump” of personal data stolen from private intelligence firm Strat for a couple years ago.

The security researcher claimed that he published his own data set of log in credentials for the purpose of further research and making authentication more secure, rather than harming the user security. He explained that analysis of usernames with passwords is usually neglected but can provide more insight than studying passwords alone.

In the meantime, Burnett emphasized that he had removed the domain portion from email addresses. He also mixed data samples from multiple security breaches over the last decade and removed keywords that might give away the source of the credentials. Of course, credit card and financial account numbers were also removed from the database, along with any other data that might be linked to an individual.

Finally, the researcher pointed out that all the information was earlier available to anyone via search engines, which means that it was thus already available to cyber criminals. In addition,the breached companies had time to reset passwords and warn their employees if necessary.Mark Burnett also claims that the hacks today were not taking place because of the passwords released, but rather because the issue of password security being not studied enough.


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