After fourth attack, hacker puts personal records of 26M people up for sale

By Arif Bacchus Published March 18, 2019

russian hackers — Image used with permission by copyright holder

A hacker going by the name of “Gnosticplayers” is selling the personal data of 26 million people who have been using the services of six different companies from across the world. The information is up for sale on the dark web for a value of up to 1.4231 bitcoin, or around $4,940. This marks the fourth time the hacker is selling people’s personal information.

Recommended Videos

According to ZDNet, the companies impacted by this hack include GameSalad, Estante Virtual, Coubic, LifeBear, Bukalapak, and Youthmanual. While most of these companies are not based in the United States. a noteworthy name on the list is GameSalad, a game-development platform that powers 75 games that reached the top 100 in Apple’s App Store.

For the majority of these companies or services, the hacker has published batch files containing emails, passwords, user names, IP addresses, and app settings. However, not all the data is up for sale, as several of these companies have paid the hacker to keep some of the information from being exposed. The passwords in the hack are also hashed as a string of characters but can still be uncovered.

The hacker is apparently selling this data because he believes these companies are not properly protecting the information of its users with the adequate encryption. “I got upset because I feel no one is learning, I just felt upset at this particular moment, because seeing this lack of security in 2019 is making me angry,” the hacker told ZDNet.

In his first round of attacks in February 2019, hacker Gnosticplayers put up for sale the information of 617 million online accounts from 16 hacked websites. That was then followed up a secondary hack which impacted eight additional websites, including travel-booking site Ixigo and live-video streaming site YouNow. The third hack affected up to 93 million users and websites including the popular Gif-sharing platform Gfycat and the online photo editor Pizap.

These types of hacks and data breaches are an increasingly common aspect of digital and online life. The best practices when using online services include avoiding using the same passwords. Instead, it is best to use alphanumeric characters in passwords, and leverage two-factor authentication to protect your accounts. We have a guide on how to create a safe password.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Arif Bacchus is a native New Yorker and a fan of all things technology. Arif works as a freelance writer at Digital Trends…

Computing

No, a lifetime VPN subscription doesn’t mean ‘your’ lifetime

iPhone with VPN service enabled in hand over a blurred background

Folks who signed up for al lifetime subscription with VPN provider VPNSecure have been discovering the true definition of “lifetime” when it comes to such deals. And it’s not the one they'd hoped to hear.

After new owners took over the company, these particular customers recently had their lifetime subscriptions canceled. The new operator of VPNSecure told them that it didn’t know about the lifetime deals when they acquired the business, adding that it was unable to honor them.

Computing

SanDisk’s latest drive sets new benchmark for consumer NVMe SSDs

The SanDisk WD Black SN8100 PCIe Gen 5 SSD with and without heatsink variants

SanDisk has officially introduced the WD Black SN8100, its latest high-end PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD targeting PC enthusiasts, gamers, and professional users. With sequential read speeds of up to 14,900 MB/s and write speeds of 14,000 MB/s, the drive sets a new bar for consumer SSD performance, surpassing some of the best NVMe SSDs currently on the market, including the Crucial T705.

The SN8100 uses a standard M.2 2280 form factor and is available in capacities of 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. It’s worth noting that the 1TB model offers lower write speeds, up to 11,000 MB/s, compared to the higher-capacity versions, which reach up to 14,000 MB/s.

Computing

Pairing the RTX 5090 with a CPU from 2006? Nvidia said ‘hold my beer’

RTX 5090.

Nvidia's best graphics cards are often paired with expensive CPUs, but what if you want to try a completely mismatched, retro configuration? Well, that used to be impossible due to driver issues. But, for whatever reason, Nvidia has just removed the instruction that prevented you from doing so, opening the door to some fun, albeit nonsensical, CPU and GPU combinations.

The instruction in question is called POPCNT (Population Count), and this is a CPU instruction that also prevents Windows 11 from being installed on older hardware. Its job is counting how many bits are present in a binary number. However, as spotted by TheBobPony on X (Twitter), POPCNT will not be a problem for Nvidia's latest graphics cards anymore.