25,000 Indian e-mail Addresses and Passwords Posted on Hacker Forums

Trend Micro has recently released a report that exposes the presence of 25,000 Indian email addresses and passwords on different hacker forums. The report states that the 25,000 Indian email addresses and passwords exposed are a mix of email ids and passwords from websites like Yahoo!, Gmail, Sify and a number of corporate email addresses.

According to Trend Micro researchers, the nature of the list indicates that the email providers themselves were not hacked, but third party websites on which these users were registered were compromised.

“This is similar to the cases of the ChristianSingles and Faithwriters websites in the USA last year, where a security issue with those websites allowed hackers to gain access to the complete user list and passwords for those websites,” commented David Peterson, Consumer Products Director, Australia and New Zealand, Trend Micro.

In the case of ChristianSingles and Faithwriters websites, the users had reused their email addresses and passwords across multiple websites and enabled the hackers to compromise the victims’ email accounts, social networking accounts, financial data through eBay and PayPal and even their business extranets.

“Internet users commonly register with dozens of websites and for convenience they typically use the same email addresses and passwords on each one of them. Many of these websites have adequate security measures in place, but those who do have adequate security mechanism, are putting their subscribers at a serious risk. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible for a typical Internet user to assess the vulnerability risk level of such websites without some form of third-party accreditation system in place,” commented Peterson.

Trend Micro suggests that Internet users must use different passwords for each website that they sign up to. They should ideally have one password for social networking sites, another for e-commerce websites and a different one for work-related websites.

Source - Network Computing