A Turkish Crime Family claims to have millions of iCloud.com, me.com, and mac.com email addresses and login credentials and is using them to try to extort money from Apple. However, Apple, analysts and experts are expressing significant doubts that the claims are true.
The group claims it has anywhere from 200 million to 750 million sets of credentials and are demanding $75,000 in cryptocurrency (such as Bitcoin) or $100,000 worth of iTunes vouchers. However, Apple said in a statement “There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID.” The company believes that the information was obtained from third party services in previous incidents.
While some independent analysts did find some samples provided by the hackers were valid, experts are not thoroughly convinced. They believe, instead, that whoever is doing this may have just a limited number of Apple account passwords and are using them against Apple. In addition, any other credentials they may have are likely being used to try and access other unrelated sites.
Hackers do indeed reuse login credentials. Now they are also implementing other automated tools as well. One is a technique called “credential stuffing.” This is the use of automated brute-force tools that can test stolen passwords against other websites quickly. While this method does have a fairly low success rate (1-2%), if the size of the database of stolen information is large enough, that may still be enough to for the hackers to run off with a significant payload.
To protect yourself from credential stuffing, use a strong unique password for each login. If your credentials are lost in one breach, it will not allow hackers to use those credentials in other sites. In most cases, stolen credentials are not used on the hacked site as the company can force reset all logins. The stolen data is used on other sites like iCloud.com. If you have different password on each site, you only must change your password on the hacked site and all your other web accounts are safe.
The Turkish Crime Family insists it does have a rather large database that was built from many databases and claims to have sold off some of the information on the Dark Web already. However, it kept the Apple related information. They also claim that when other cybercriminals found out about their database, they started to provide even more stolen information to be added to it. This is according to information posted on a website called Meethackers.
Apple says it is monitoring to prevent unauthorized access to any accounts. It is also working with law enforcement to try and identify this group.
For banks and credit unions
Share this article with your members
Copy a ready-made summary and link for your newsletter, website or social posts.
