- Hacker Adkka72424 claims leak of 6.8 billion unique email addresses
- Cybernews confirmed about 3 billion usable emails, archive size 150 GB
- Massive leak poses phishing and BEC risks through tailored social engineering attacks
A hacker claims to have obtained and leaked 6.8 billion unique email addresses — and while the claims are unconfirmed at this time, initial reports indicate that at least half of those emails are genuine.
Scientists know Cyber news recently found a new post on a popular data leak forum created by a hacker with the alias Adkka72424 who claims to have obtained 6.8 billion unique email addresses through various channels – some of which were obtained illegally.
“Two years ago I obtained more than 3.3 billion unique email addresses. After a long break I started this again and spent about 2 months extracting emails from various combinations, ULP collections, logs and databases and extracted 6,839,584,670 unique email addresses,” the post reads.
At least half are useful
We don’t know if the database is offered for free or sold, but Cyber news says the archive is 150GB. Analyzing the sample, they said that after removing useless emails, duplicates and invalid addresses, about three billion could be useful.
This would still rank it among the biggest email leaks of all time, and a treasure trove for all hackers who engage in phishing and business email compromise.
“Based on comments on the forum thread, most users are excited to use the data to check if other leaks contain fresh new data by comparing posts to this release,” Cyber news said.
“This allows threat actors to save time by only trying to exploit newly discovered leaked accounts.”
Many criminals, especially those engaged in social engineering, would profile their victims before attacking. They would look for their workplace, position, working hours, salary and most importantly – contact information. By combining all of these and creating a detailed profile, they are able to create tailored, highly effective phishing emails that can result in credential leaks and fraudulent bank transfers.
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