As protests spread across the country over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, cyberattacks also targeted the Minnesota’s city’s police department. On Sunday, …
As protests spread across the country over George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, cyberattacks also targeted the Minnesota’s city’s police department. On Sunday, the hacker group Anonymous took credit for an attack that took down the Minneapolis police department’s website, and also published a set of email addresses and passwords it claimed to have stolen.
But a deeper look at the leaked 798 email addresses and passwords suggest that there wasn’t any data stolen at all and it was actually repackaged data from previous, unrelated cyberattacks. Troy Hunt, security researcher and founder of the « Have I Been Pwned » database, looked at the list of released login credentials and found that 95% had already been revealed in older breaches.
In entirely new breaches, Hunt said you usually don’t see over 80% of repeats. Using old, stolen credentials with a different framing is not new, as cybercriminals will often compile billions of accounts to sell as if they’re new batches.
