Remember MySpace? Where just about everybody was on it, that is, until Facebook came into the scene. For many, the website is already dead. However, the now failed social network from beyond the grave. LeakedSource, a search engine that is specializing in data obtained through breaches in security, has revealed that the old social networking portal has indeed been hacked. It has compromised personal information of its over 360-million users. It is also not yet clear when the breach took place. If it happened quite a while back, it is questionable why the company never reported it.
Recent Report of a MySpace Hack is Questionable
The information provided to LeakedSource pertaining to the MySpace hack was sent from an anonymous hacker. While the social media website has yet to make a public statement about the attack, and if it will, Cybershack was able to identify a number of accounts that are associated with the company’s staff members within the leaked database. Therefore, it does suggest that the report about the cyber-attack contain a certain amount of legitimacy.
While there are many who have already abandoned MySpace for Facebook or other social networking portals such as Instagram, Twitter, and even Snapchat, the old social media website does still get around 50-million monthly visitors. If you think that’s a lot, that’s pocket change as compared to Facebook’s 1.65-billion monthly active users. Even though you may not be using it, MySpace still pose a risk in submitting towards cyber-attacks and it is perhaps due to poor security measures. Therefore, even if you’re not using it anymore but still have an account there, and it’s the same credentials that you use for other online profiles, then you may be in trouble.
According to the report, there are over 360-million accounts that were taken into the hacked database, and there are over 427-million passwords between them. Why the larger number of passwords? It’s because there are those who have secondary passwords for one account. These passwords were stored away with SHA1 encryption, however they are not salted. By salt it means a chunk of randomly generated data has been added towards passwords prior to them being encrypted which makes them more difficult to crack.
LeakedSource states that “homelessspa” was the most used password for MySpace users within the leak, as it is the default password for new accounts. As for the top 4 following that, they are “password1,” “abc123,” “123456,” and “myspace1.”