14 DAY TRIAL // It looks as the 10,000 accounts leaked by the Nepali group of hackers called Team Swastika are not associated to any Facebook profiles as the gang claimed.
The hacker collective shocked the world not long ago when they published the large number of credentials that allegedly belonged to some members of the social media website.
According to Rik Ferguson from Trend Micro, he managed to take a look at the data before it was removed by Pastebin and what he found was indeed a large number of credential sets that seemed to belong to Facebook members.
Probably obtained as a result of a mass scale phishing expedition, while the emails and their passwords might be real, they actually have nothing to do with the social network.
“This does not represent a hack of Facebook or anyone’s Facebook profiles. Our security experts have reviewed this data and found it to be a set of e-mail and password combinations that are not associated with any live Facebook accounts,“ Facebook representatives told Ferguson.
This comes to show that Zuckerberg's company was not breached in any way but the fact still remains that a lot of people neglected some basic security rules when they lost their virtual possessions.
Upon studying the files, the researcher came to the conclusion that a lot of the victims were using really weak passwords to protect their accounts.
As internauts from all around the world were affected, a quick statistic can be drawn up from the incident. Short numerical passwords, favorite football clubs and even derivations of the username were supposed to keep their emails safe.
Facebook has enough privacy weaknesses, they don't have to be hacked for their members to become victims, but the fact that many people fail to implement even the most basic security measures is highly concerning.
The simplest thing to do is not use the same safeword to guard all your online assets. This way, if one of the credentials gets phished, the rest of your accounts will remain safe.