Car forum account hacked for 45 million users

[ethan]

That's a bloody sad news man, please change your your password immediately if you have any account in below sites.

45 Million Accounts Hacked At Some Of The Biggest Car Forums

[Derick]

That's a scary news and thankfully I use a useless pw all across these online social media and forum sites. Btw you know which sites were those?

[adil]

Just read above link and it's one of the reference link stating.... 

https://www.leakedsource.com/blog/verticalscope

Passwords were stored in various encryption methods but less than 10% of the domains which account for a very small amount of leaked records used difficult to break encryption (less than a couple million). Most of the records (over 40 million) were just MD5 with salting and this is insufficient. 

The following table shows the top passwords used by VerticalScope Network users. There seem to be a lot of automated registrations and you can easily see that they own many automobile forums.

 

Rank	Password	Frequency
1	123456	150,852
2	18atcskd2w	91,103
3	password	83,862
4	3rjs1la7qe	74,806
5	indya123	62,453
6	q0tsrbv488	62,308
7	india123	62,296
8	110110jp	57,746
9	sojdlg123aljg	52,406
10	thegreat123	49,068
11	123456789	42,073
12	pass1478	39,962
13	d1lakiss	33,177
14	111111	29,850
15	qwerty	25,059
16	yagjecc826	21,975
17	rjgo7we138	21,492
18	12345678	20,703
19	mustang	20,600
20	g9l2d1fzpy	19,842
21	megasecret	16,834
22	2h7vkzo266	15,945
23	ektuhi1234	15,917
24	r9lw4j8khx	15,188
25	tester01	14,966
26	abc123	14,794
27	password1	14,719
28	iw14fi9j	14,319
29	freeze112	13,939
30	vqsablpzla	13,603
31	123hfjdk147	13,386
32	12345	13,115
33	6v21wbgad	12,517
34	letmein	11,946
35	1234	11,785
36	uqa9ebw445	11,729
37	yuantuo2012	11,369
38	asdfasdf	11,255
39	qti7zxh18u	11,220
40	yamaha	11,186
41	monkey	11,047
42	nks230kjs82	11,011
43	iojsjd9887	10,791
44	corvette	10,763
45	paintball	10,433
46	lookatme123	10,295
47	mongd123	10,052
48	welcome123	9,729
49	fake1234	9,639
50	shadow	9,611
51	baseball	9,603
52	harley	9,357
53	sara2000	9,303
54	abcd1234	9,218
55	w5txn36alfw	9,162

[adil]

This is just a list of forum that AutoGuide has....... and many others groups were there.

http://www.autoguide.com/forums.html

[Barry]

It's surprisingly easy to do too. A guy showed me a simple program once, he added a list of all the usernames then a list of all the most commonly used passwords then the program starts trying all combinations and before you know it, you have access to the majority of peoples accounts. There's not much you can do to protect yourself. I use different passwords for every site I use as if they get one of them, at least they don't have access to all my accounts everywhere.

[taqir]

6 hours ago, adil said:

There seem to be a lot of automated registrations

Why there is an automated registrations? From spammers or hackers?

[Barry]

Advertising spambots

[taqir]

12 minutes ago, Technician said:

Advertising spambots

Means....? I am sorry I didn't get that.

[Barry]

Advertising spambots. They're programs that automatically create accounts on forums and post spam adverts in the sub forums. 

[brandan]

9 hours ago, adil said:

you can easily see that they own many automobile forums.

With this automated registration sounds like they were automatically creating fake users to rig the advertising payout as advertiser like to display their ads in forums that has thousands or millions of users instead of forum that has few hundred count.

Spambot posting backlinks is now thing of past, as many modern forum software's blocks such users registration automatically.