MySpace, Tumblr Lose Millions of Accounts in Massive Hack Attack
- MySpace accounts hacked: 360 Million
- LinkedIn accounts hacked: 117 Million
- Tumblr accounts hacked: 65 Million
- Katy Perry’s Twitter account with 89 million followers hacked
These are huge numbers.
No one is safe online. You simply can’t protect anything from the prying eyes of the hyper-active hackers and online snoopers. And they are making millions of billions of dollars by selling these stolen accounts to third parties.
This is really hilarious. It’s not the first time that such a massive data breach has dented netizens’ privacy to such a large extent. Target, the British retail giant become the first victim of credit card fraud, two years ago, when a large number of credit cards were hacked by the so called hackers.
The recent wave of data breach has taken a toll on MySpace and Tumblr, tow of the most commonly used and most famous social media websites.
For Tumblr, it’s the second hack attack, after a similar attack crippled the website’s operations three years ago in 2013. According to Tumblr’s official blog, a total of 65,469,298 unique passwords were compromised. It is to note that Tumblr’s official blog has denied the fact that the compromised accounts were used to hack the company’s accounts.
“As soon as we became aware of this, our security team thoroughly investigated the matter. Our analysis gives us no reason to believe that this information was used to access Tumblr accounts”, the organization’s blog stated.
It is also interesting to note that this is the same hacker that had attacked MySpace and LinkedIn accounts, and sold them to get a hefty amount of money.
Meanwhile, LinkedIn also lost 117 million user accounts in a massive hack attack in May 2011.
The hacker group, called ‘Peace’ is now selling MySpace data for £2,200. It is interesting to note that the hackers are demanding the payment in bitcoin.
And now the celebrities are under attack as well. Katy Perry, the American pop singer has lost her Twitter account to a hack attack. With more than 89 million followers, she is one of the most admired and followed pop singers on Twitter.
It’s either the case of hackers have become super active, or the users have become oblivious about protecting their personal information over the web.
With the sudden increase in the unwarranted data and personal online privacy breach incidents, it’s high time for all of us – including the common people and the celebrities to counter such events by using unique, strong, and lengthy passwords.
Although relying on passwords is not a permanent solution, people must be made to understand the importance of online privacy, and the sanctity of the data they share online. The netizens should keep a check on each of their social media accounts, and must share the information, that they deem worthy of sharing. Not every information should be shared over the web.
