2 Million Passwords Compromised After Botnet Infection Spree

Just how good is the security of your computer? Do you have really, really strong passwords, so much so that it is virtually impossible to crack them even with brute force computing? Well, you know what they say about security – a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In one of the more recent security snafus to date, more than two million passwords have been posted online after a botnet managed to successfully infect thousands of machines, while relying on a keylogger to obtain those passwords. These passwords do not hail from a particular online service, but rather, will include Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

We do know that out of the 2 million passwords which have been leaked online, around 300,000 of those happen to be passwords of Facebook accounts. Security firm TrustWave have reason to believe that the botnet, known as Pony, had managed to infect thousands of computers, and could even be in action still as you read this. After analyzing the data, Trustwave picked up something interesting – more than 15,000 instances of a password being ‘123456’ made up part of the compromised passwords, now how about that? Malware is always tough to look out for, don’t you think so?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Malware, Security