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Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa, also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users.

Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art.

The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase, a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users.

The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers.

Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords successfully within just a few days.

LeakBase has shared a dump of 4.5 million Taringa users with The Hacker News to help us verify the authenticity of the leaked database.

Using email addresses in the dump, we contacted a few random Taringa users with their plain text passwords, who acknowledged the authenticity of their credentials.

The data breach reportedly occurred last month, and the company then alerted its users via a blog post, sharing more information about the incident.

"It is likely that the attackers have made the database containing nicks, email addresses and encrypted passwords. No phone numbers and access credentials from other social networks have been compromised as well as addresses of bitcoin wallets from the Taringa program! Creators." the post (translated) says.

"At the moment there is no concrete evidence that the attackers continue to have access to the Taringa code! and our team continues to monitor unusual movements in our infrastructure."

To protect its users, Taringa is currently sending a password reset link via an email to its users as soon as they access their account with an old password.
One of the contacted users has also shared a screenshot of the notice with The Hacker News, as shown above.

"We've made a massive password reset strategy and also increased the encryption of the passwords from MD5 to SHA256. We've also been in contact with our community via our customer support team," a Taringa spokesperson told The Hacker News.

Leaked Database Analysis

Here below we have a brief analysis of the leaked database, which suggests that even after countless warnings, most people are continuously using deadly-simple passwords to safeguard their most sensitive data.

As you can see in the image given below, LeakBase team managed to crack 26,939,351 out of 28,722,877 passwords hashed using the MD5 algorithm, out of which over 15 Million were unique passwords.

The vast majority of the cracked passwords were alpha and lower case alpha and did not contain any special characters or symbols.


Here below we have the list of most popular/common passwords chosen by Taringa users that also includes top worst passwords such as 123456789, 123456, 1234567890, 000000, 12345, and 12345678.

The most popular length of the password was six characters long, followed closely by eight characters, nine and ten characters. Expectedly, the percentages drop drastically as you go higher in length.


Besides the cracked passwords, LeakBase also take a look at the email addresses contained in the leaked data dump, and the most common email domains are as follows:

But, are Taringa users entirely responsible for choosing weak passwords?

Not completely. It's also the fault of the company, who failed to enforce a strong password policy on their users, eventually allowing them to sign up with weak passwords.

After data breaches, the organisations tend to blame the end users for poor password security, but they forget to provide them one.

So far, it has not been clear who is behind the attack on Taringa, neither how the attackers managed to breach into its servers.

Meanwhile, in a separate news,we reported about an unknown hacker selling personal details on more than 6 million high-profile Instagram accounts on an online website, Doxagram, after the hacker breached the Facebook-owned photo sharing service using a flaw in its API.

How to Help Protect Yourself from Data Breaches

Of course, if you are one of those potentially affected users, you are strongly recommended to change your passwords immediately.

Also, change passwords for other online accounts for which you are using the same password as for Taringa account.

Even if any website allows you to create an account with a weak password, you should always choose a complex password. Use a good password manager, if you find following best practices difficult.

Moreover, avoid clicking on any suspicious link or attachment you received via an email and providing your personal or financial information without verifying the source correctly.

Macintosh computers are often considered to be safer than those running Windows operating system, but a recently discovered attack technique proves it all wrong.

All an attacker needs is a $300 device to seize full control of your Mac or MacBook.

Swedish hacker and penetration tester Ulf Frisk has developed a new device that can steal the password from virtually any Mac laptop while it is sleeping or even locked in just 30 seconds, allowing hackers to unlock any Mac computer and even decrypt the files on its hard drive.

So, next time when you leave your Apple's laptop unattended, be sure to shut it down completely rather than just putting the system in sleep mode or locked.

Here's How an Attacker can steal your Mac FileVault2 Password

The researcher devised this technique by exploiting two designing flaws he discovered last July in Apple's FileVault2 full-disk encryption software.

The first issue is that the Mac system does not protect itself against Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks before macOS is started.

It's because the Mac EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface (similar to a PC's BIOS) let devices plugged in over Thunderbolt to access memory without enabling DMA protections, which allows Thunderbolt devices to read and write memory.

Secondly, the password to the FileVault encrypted disk is stored in clear text in memory, even when the computer is in sleep mode or locked. When the computer reboots, the password is put in multiple memory locations within a fixed memory range, making it readable by hacking devices.

Dubbed PCILeech and costs approximately $300, the hacking device exploits these two vulnerabilities to carry out DMA attacks and extract Mac FileVault2 passwords from a device's memory in clear text before macOS boots, and anti-DMA protections come into effect.

To do this, all an attacker needs is access to a target Mac computer for just a few minutes to connect the PCILeech hacking device to the computer via its Thunderbolt port, which would allow the attacker to have full access to its data.

Video Demonstration of the Attack

Frisk also provided a video demonstration, which shows how he just plugged in a card flashed with his open source PCILeech software tool into the Mac's Thunderbolt port, which ran the hacking tool on the target Mac or MackBook, rebooted the system, and read the Mac password on the other laptop.


Yes, the attack only works if an attacker has physical access to a target Mac or MacBook, but all it takes is just 30 seconds to carry out successfully.

"Anyone including, but not limited to, your colleagues, the police, the evil maid and the thief will have full access to your data as long as they can gain physical access - unless the Mac is completely shut down," Frisk explained in a blog post on Thursday. 

"If the Mac is sleeping it is still vulnerable. Just stroll up to a locked Mac, plug in the Thunderbolt device, force a reboot (ctrl+cmd+power) and wait for the password to be displayed in less than 30 seconds!"

Frisk reported his findings to Apple in August and the company fixed the issues in macOS 10.12.2 released on 13 December.

So Apple desktop users are required to update their devices to the latest version of its operating system to be safe.

Ashley Madison, an American most prominent dating website that helps married people cheat on their spouses has been hacked, has agreed to pay a hefty fine of $1.6 Million for failing to protect account information of 36 Million users, after a massive data breach last year.

Yes, the parent company of Ashley Madison, Ruby Corp. will pay $1.6 Million to settle charges from both Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 13 states alleging that it misled its consumers about its privacy practices and did not do enough to protect their information.

Not only the company failed to protect the account information of its 36 Million users, but also it failed to delete account information after regretful users paid a $20 fee for "Full Delete" of their accounts.

Moreover, the Ashley Madison site operators were accused of creating fake accounts of "female" users in an effort to attract new members.

Avid Life Media denied the claim at the time, but a year later when the company rebranded as Ruby Corp., it admitted that tens of thousands of female users on AshleyMadison.com had just been lines of code.

Last year, a group of hackers released tons of gigabytes of critical data belonging to the company's internal operation as well as millions of Ashley Madison users that led to blackmails and even suicides.

Ruby Corp. was intended to pay a total of $17.5 Million fine -- $8.75 million fine to the FTC and another $8.75 million to 13 states that also filed complaints -- but the company can afford to pay just $1.6 Million fine.

"Today's settlement closes an important chapter on the company's past and reinforces our commitment to operating with integrity and to building a new future for our members, our team and our company," Rob Segal, Ruby's newly-appointed CEO, wrote in a blog post.

Besides this, Ruby Corp. has agreed to 20 years' worth of the FTC overseeing its network security to ensure that user data is being protected.

Here's the federal court order [PDF] that requires Ashley Madison to:

• Perform a risk assessment to protect customer data
• Implement new data security protocols
• Upgrade systems based on the assessments
• Offer periodic security risk assessment (both internal and third-party)
• Require "reasonable safeguards" against any potential cyber attacks from their service providers

Ashley Madison was hacked in July 2015, resulting in the disclosure of personal information belonging to 35 Million users, including their usernames, first and last names, passwords, credit card data info, street names, phone numbers, transactions records, and email addresses.

Facebook is reportedly buying stolen passwords that hackers are selling on the underground black market in an effort to keep its users' accounts safe.

On the one hand, we just came to know that Yahoo did not inform its users of the recently disclosed major 2014 hacking incident that exposed half a billion user accounts even after being aware of the hack in 2014.

On the other hand, Facebook takes every single measure to protect its users' security even after the company managed to avoid any kind of security scandal, data breach or hacks that have recently affected top notch companies.

Speaking at the Web Summit 2016 technology conference in Portugal, Facebook CSO Alex Stamos said that over 1.3 Billion people use Facebook every day, and keeping them secure is building attack-proof software to keep out hackers, but keeping them safe is actually a huge task.

Stamos said there is a difference between 'security' and 'safety,' as he believes that his team can "build perfectly secure software and yet people can still get hurt."

Stamos was former Chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo who left the company in 2015 after discovering that its Chief Executive Marissa Mayer authorized the government surveillance program.

Stamos joined Facebook in summer 2015 and now leads the security team at the social network. He said that the biggest headache he deals there with is caused by passwords users keep securing their accounts.

"The reuse of passwords is the No. 1 cause of harm on the internet," said the security chief.

According to him, the username and password system that was initially introduced in the 1970’s will not help us now in 2016.

As CNET reports, when passwords are stolen in masses and traded on the black market, it becomes apparent just how many of users are choosing the weakest passwords, such as 12345 and password, to secure their online accounts, automatically making their account more vulnerable to being hacked.

And this issue is something the social network giant is keen to help its users avoid.

In an attempt to check that its users are not making use of these commonly used passwords for their Facebook accounts, Stamos disclosed that the company buys passwords from the black market and then cross-references them with encrypted passwords used on its site.

Stamos said that the social network then alerts tens of millions of users that their passwords needed changing as they were not strong enough to protect their accounts.

Facebook provides you a whole bunch of tools to tighten up the security of your account, including traditional two-factor authentication, identifying faces of friends, as well as machine learning algorithms to determine and inform whether activity on your account is fraudulent.

Users are always advised to enable Two-factor authentication, which is an effective measure to keep a tight hold on your account even after hackers have your credentials.

Another new measure tackles the issue of account recovery. So, even if hackers find their way into your email account that could allow them to seize your Facebook account easily by resetting your password, the social network allows you to let your close friends verify account recovery request on your behalf.

Top 25 Worst Passwords of 2015

1. 123456
2. password
3. 12345678
4. qwerty
5. 12345
6. 123456789
7. football
8. 1234
9. 1234567
10. baseball
11. welcome
12. 1234567890
13. abc123
14. 111111
15. 1qaz2wsx
16. dragon
17. master
18. monkey
19. letmein
20. login
21. princess
22. qwertyuiop
23. solo
24. passw0rd
25. starwars

"The longer passwords are so simple as to make their extra length virtually worthless as a security measure," says SplashData

How to Create a Strong Password

• Use a combination of lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and special characters of 8 characters long or more like s9%w^8@t$i.
• Use short passphrases with special characters separating to make it difficult for crackers and could be easily remembered like cry%like@me (cry like me).
• Avoid using the same combination of passwords for different websites.
• If it is difficult for you to remember different passwords for different websites, then use best Password Manager applications like RoboForm, 1Password, LastPass.

OS X Zero-Day Exploit in the Wild

"The script that exploits the DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE vulnerability is written to a file and then executed," Malwarebytes researchers explains in a blog post. "Part of the script involves deleting itself when it's finished."
"The real meat of the script, though, involves modifying the Sudoers file. The change made by the script allows shell commands to be executed as root using sudo, without the usual requirement for entering a password."

No Way Out for Mac Users

So, what about Hiring a Hacker?

Do You Also want to Hack Facebook Accounts?

Below are the stats:

• 23% of projects relate to Facebook hacking, often involving a business dispute or jilted romance.
• 14% of projects relate to Google account hacking, also involving a business dispute or jilted romance.
• 8% of projects involve students asking for University’s computer systems to be hacked in order to improve their exam grades.
• 3% of projects involve burying some embarrassing tidbit, essentially an ersatz Right to be Forgotten.

Revealing True Identity of Customers

One of the scientists Dr Stankovski said, "Here we offer a novel encryption scheme derived from biology, radically different from any earlier procedure. Inspired by the time-varying nature of the cardio-respiratory coupling functions recently discovered in humans, we propose a new encryption scheme that is highly resistant to conventional methods of attack."

• Use a combination of lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and special characters of 8 characters long or more like s9%w^8@t$i
• Use short passphrases with special characters separating to make it difficult for crackers and could be easily remembered like cry%like@me (cry like me)
• Avoid using the same combination of passwords for different websites
• If it is difficult for you to remember different passwords for different websites and accounts than try using Password manager applications like RoboForm, 1Password, LastPass.

“We sent an email to users with compromised accounts letting them know what to do,”

“Their passwords have been reset and personal access tokens, OAuth authorizations, and SSH keys have all been revoked.” 

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