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A Thief Named 'Mastermind' Hacked 20 Million Accounts On A Russian Dating Website

Jan 26, 2015, 19:14 IST

TopfaceTopface

As if online dating wasn't sketchy enough, now you have to worry about hackers.

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About 20 million accounts on a Russia-based dating website called Topface, according to a report by Bloomberg. About 40% of the data came from European users.

The thief who operated under the alias "Mastermind" then offered the accounts for sale on a website used by cyber criminals, which was detected by the fraud-detection software-maker, Easy Solutions Inc.

"... hackers can use stolen credentials to try to access bank accounts, health records or other more sensitive data," Easy Solution's CEO Daniel Ingevaldson told Bloomberg in a phone interview.

"Ingevaldson said such personal information usually sells quickly, to fraudsters who use automated software programs to find sites where people used the same information they did to access the dating site," according to Bloomberg. Hackers have been increasingly targeting social media websites to steal usernames and passwords, in order to try and break into electronic-payment and mobile-payment accounts. But Topface's CEO Dmitry Fiolatov remains pretty calm. He says that there is no proof of the breach but the company is currently investigating the situation. 90% of Topface users access the site through Facebook and other social networks. Fiolatov stated that Topface doesn't have access to their passwords and doesn't keep secure information such as payment data. "We are pretty sure that our users will not have any problems even if their data was stolen from our service," he said. You can read the whole report on Bloomberg here.
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