Platforms facilitating illegal activity on the Internet, such as selling stolen passwords and exchanging stolen bitcoins, are a plague. That being said, Karma has a way of working out in the end, as Nulled.io, a hacker forum, was compromised and the data has been made available on a data breach sharing site.
Data Dump Puts Nulled.io Users At Risk
In a rather surprising turn of events, the data collected from the Nulled.io breach is visible to anyone in the world, rather than hiding in on the deep web. Sensitive information of over 500,000 members has been stolen, resulting in a 1.3GB compressed archive file. Exposing these hackers may seem morally right, but that doesn’t make it legal all of a sudden.
At the same time, this type of information can give law enforcement officials valuable insights as to who committed which online crimes at any given time. Very few people would oppose this idea, even though the evidence and information gathered as part of this Nulled.io database breach will not hold up in court.
However, there are some interesting details to take note of, as we gain insights in the day-to-day bartering that takes place on the Nulled.io forum. One particular trade mentions stolen bitcoins and PayPal accounts changing hands, at a fee of between five and 10 percent. However, no details are provided as to where this stolen funds is coming from.
Among the information collected in this data dump are email addresses and IP addresses belonging to over half a million user accounts. Usernames and passwords are part of the package too, although passwords are hashed with the MD5 algorithm. Additionally, all of these hashes have a cryptographic salt, reducing the chances of success for cracking these passwords.
But there is more, as the Nulled.io data dump also seems to include purchasing histories and VIP forums discussions. With over 2 million posts and 800,000 personal messages to sift through, this data dump is a treasure trove of information, and a valuable educational resource. Up until now, it remains unclear as to how the hack took place exactly, but there is a good chance the forum software and plugins contained several security vulnerabilities.
Source: Ars Technica
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