A Password Set To Password Leads To A $15 Million Ransom Demand
News and information from the Advent IM team.
- by Olivia Lawlor-Blackburn
- Industry News
There’s a long list of passwords that are so terrible that you should never, ever use them. One of the absolute worst is password, yet it keeps popping up in breaches. Just this week password allegedly allowed hackers to break in to a server, steal data and issue a $15 million ransom demand to the victim.
The victim in this case was credit reporting giant TransUnion’s South Africa unit. It maintains credit data on more than 24 million South African residents.
The attacker was a Brazilian group that calls itself N4ughtysecTU. In a conversation with Bleeping Computer, a N4ughtysecTU representative said they gained access to a TransUnion South Africa servers via a simple brute force dictionary attack.
One of the accounts on the server had been secured with password, which takes modern hacking tools about a second to guess. TransUnion says that the account in question belonged to one of its authorized clients.
Read via Forbes