Hacker Steals 45 Million Records from 1,100 Home, Sports and Tech Support Forums

VerticalScope.com, a company that runs multiple support forums on various topics, has suffered a massive data breach in February 2016 when a hacker managed to steal over 45 million user records from its database.

The records, which data breach indexing site LeakedSource has managed to acquire and analyze, contain details from over 1,100 tech support portals VerticalScope is running on different domains.

LeakedSource says the biggest data troves are from sites such as Techsupportforum.com, MobileCampsites.com, Pbnation.com, and Motorcycle.com.

There are no clues on who was behind the data breach, but LeakedSource says the incident took place in February 2016. VerticalScope confirmed the breach, after LeakedSource's staff got ahold of the data on April 27.

Leaked data contains easy-to-crack MD5-hashed passwords

LeakedSource says that for each record they found an email address, a username, an IP address, one or two passwords. Not all records contain all the details for each user.

"Given the massive scale of this breach, it is also likely that VerticalScope stored all of their data on interconnected or even the same servers as there is no other way to explain a theft on such a large scale," a LeakedSource representative explained.

The bad news doesn't stop here for VerticalScope users, and it appears that from LeakedSource's analysis of the leaked passwords, around 90 percent (over 40 million) were protected with the MD5 hashing algorithm. MD5 is vulnerable to simple collision attacks, and passwords hashed with MD5 are easy to break.

The MD5 passwords were also salted. The rest of the passwords were stored using various encryption algorithms, some of which are hard to break and considered safe to use.

Below is a table with the most used passwords. The uniqueness of some of the passwords reveals the presence of many bots or fake users.