Russian Hackers Grab More than 1-Billion Passwords

A Russian crime ring has amassed over 1.2 billion user names and password combinations making it the largest known security flaws in history. Security researchers say that beyond the user name and password combos, there were more than 500 million e-mail addresses and credentials intercepted. The crime was discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, WI that included confidential material gathered from over 400,000 websites. The group, dubbed CyberVor (vor meaning thief in Russian), stole data from thousands of businesses Web sites, both small and large, and even from personal Web sites. Before this, Hold Security was the company that discovered the theft of tens of millions of records from Adobe Systems. To this point, while there is no evidence that the criminals have sold this information to anyone yet, the hackers appear to be using the stolen information to send spam on social networks.