Millions Of MySpace Accounts Leaked Online

In what it is yet another major hacking incident, 360 million user accounts on the social media network MySpace have been leaked online.

MySpace, one of the first social media networks, used to be popular before Facebook and Twitter. For those who used to have an account on MySpace, it is most likely that their login details have been hacked. LeakedSource is claiming that it has the passwords for over 360 million accounts on MySpace.

LeakedSource is a search engine capable of searching a huge number of leaked accounts acquired from various sources. They have been able to accumulate these data in a short period of time through a combination of rumor-chasing and deep-web scavenging techniques. Among the data present in their database included are major discoveries such as LinkedIn and MySpace.

Now, LeakedSource has announced that they have obtained and added a copy of the MySpace database to its ever-growing searchable repository of leaked data. The database was provided by the hacker "Tessa88@exploit.im."

The leaked database may contain in each record a username, an e-mail address and a password or even two passwords. According to LifeHacker, MySpace's stored passwords were encrypted by Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1).

The program has been designed by the United States National Security Agency, and it produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value called a message digest. A SHA-1 hash value is typically 40 digits long, and it is rendered as a hexadecimal number. This is an old form of encryption, and it is no longer considered secure against experienced hackers.

According to Fortune, not only the methods MySpace used for storing passwords were using a very weak encryption, but the passwords themselves were easy to decrypt, since nearly none contained an upper case character. For instance, a password very easy for a human to guess such as "password1" appears 585,503 times.

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