Russian Hacker Tries to Sell 33 Million Twitter Accounts, 123456 Is Most Popular Password

Almost 33 million Twitter accounts have been hacked and the data posted online for sale, according to leakedsource.com.

The data was posted on dark web, closed-off part of internet where illicit operations often take place, by user “[email protected].”

The data includes user names, emails, sometimes secondary emails, and Twitter passwords.

“We have very strong evidence that Twitter was not hacked, rather the consumer was,” Leakedsource stated, meaning hackers likely collected the data from malware-infected computers, rather than Twitter servers.

Twitter’s Trust and Information Security officer, Michael Coates, confirmed Twitter was not hacked.

“We have investigated reports of Twitter usernames/passwords on the dark web, and we’re confident that our systems have not been breached,” Coates tweeted. 

We securely store all passwords w/ bcrypt. We are working with @leakedsource to obtain this info & take additional steps to protect users.

— Michael Coates ஃ (@_mwc) June 9, 2016

Leakedsource offered an explanation, that “the malware sent every saved username and password from browsers like Chrome and Firefox back to the hackers from all websites, including Twitter.”

That would mean users who had their Twitter account breached this time should also change their other passwords and possibly reinstall their computers.

It may be premature to link recent celebrity Twitter hacks to this leak.

In recent months Katty Perry, Mark Zuckerberg, and the NFL had their Twitter accounts hacked.

There are two reasons to believe this massive leak may be unrelated.

First, based on the leaked email addresses, more than 7 million had the Russian domain (.ru). Leakedsource stated that “more likely the malware was spread to Russians.”

And second, “we triple checked, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t in this data set,” the website stated.

The hacker who took credit for hacking Zuckerberg’s Twitter indicated he gained the access information from the LinkedIn leak that put over 100 million people’s account details on a dark web last month.

Leakedsource gathers leaked data and allows anyone to search the data. Users can also remove their own data from the database.

“123456” Most Popular Password

Leakedsource published a list of the most popular passwords among the hacked Twitter accounts. We wouldn’t recommend most of them---especially any from the top 10.

But there are also surprisingly popular ones, like the “9-11-1961,” that more than 10,000 user picked as their password. Is it Sept. 11, 1961? Or Nov. 9, 1961? Was that just a day a lot of future Twitter users were born, or is there some special meaning to the date?

Perhaps even more surprisingly, over 6,600 users picked password “cepetsugih.” Cepet sugih means “rich quick” in Javanese, a language spoken by almost 100 million people, mainly Javanese, the largest ethnic group of Indonesia.

More than 5,400 people picked the password “iloveyou.”

Less than 1.5 percent of the 32,888,300 hacked accounts used any of 44 most popular (and mostly weak) passwords. Also, since the passwords were probably extracted through malware, directly from the users’ computers, even strong password wouldn’t help. Not letting your web browser remember your passwords might have.

Leakedsource also released a list of the most popular email domains among the leaked accounts: