MySpace has revealed a hacker has stolen usernames and passwords from over 360 million accounts on its site.
The social media portal, which was popular from 2005 to 2008, mentioned in a blog post the hack was made known to them before the past weekend. It was reported that MySpace usernames, passwords, secondary passwords and email addresses were all stolen. The information was allegedly made accessible on an “online hacker forum”.
Those reportedly affected by the hack are users that signed up before June 2013, which is mostly everyone that joined during the most popular years. MySpace released the following statement: “The compromised data is related to the period before those measures were implemented. We are currently utilizing advanced protocols including double salted hashes (random data that is used as an additional input to a one-way function that “hashes” a password or passphrase) to store passwords. MySpace has taken additional security steps in light of the recent report.”
MySpace believes a hacker named “Peace” is responsible for the major hack, along with the recent hacks of Linkedin and Tumbler. They’ve come to the conclusion that the information stolen can be used to break into other user accounts elsewhere and advised former MySpace users to change their usernames and passwords that are currently being used to prevent further hacks.
MySpace is currently working with the authorities to investigate the cyber-crime.
