Email Accounts Hacked: Suspect Returns Data After Getting Social Media Likes [VIDEO]
In a bizarre series of events on Wednesday, a young Russian hacker, who was in possession of hundreds of millions of stolen email account data, offered researchers a bargain for the looted data, then later decided to give the massive cache away for free, in exchange for likes and upvotes on the hacker's social media page.
According to Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, a cybersecurity firm, the stolen data was in the possession of a young Russian hacker known in the Deep Web as "The Collector."
What's particularly interesting, however, was that the 272 million email accounts that The Collector returned are but a small fraction of the hacker's loot. In a statement, Hold Security stated that The Collector is actually in possession of about 1.17 billion stolen credentials from a series of breaches.
Most of the 272 million accounts that were returned by the young Russian hacker came from one of Russia's most popular email providers, Mail.ru, as well as other prominent email providers such as Yahoo! Mail, Microsoft Hotmail and Google's Gmail.
While the massive amount of data that the hacker possessed is fascinating enough, the events that transpired during the data's retrieval was even more notable. While communicating with The Collector, Hold Security asked about the price required for the data's retrieval. Usually, when hackers negotiate, they quote an amount that they deem is equal to the value of the data they possess.
In the case of The Collector, however, the hacker surprised the security firm's researchers by stating that the 272 million email accounts would be handed over to Hold Security for the measly price of 50 rubles. In the current exchange rate, 50 rubles would be worth about a dollar.
"I am just getting rid of it but I won't do it for free," The Collector stated, according to Hold Security.
After some more negotiating, however, the cyber security firm was able to get an even better deal. The Collector agreed to send over the stolen data, in exchange for likes and upvotes for the hacker's social media pages.
"It is rather funny to negotiate over this, but finally, the hacker just asks us to add likes/votes to his social media page (so much for anonymity). That we can do, and once he is satisfied with the results we get a link to an incredible 10 gigabytes in a compressed database, which takes us more than an hour to download," Hold Security wrote.
Hold Security has been contacting the email providers about the accounts which were compromised.
