UPDATED 03:03 EDT / SEPTEMBER 02 2016

NEWS

Details of 43m+ accounts obtained in Last.fm hack

Another day, another revelation about a historical hack. Following on from Dropbox, Inc. earlier this week comes details from the hacking of music website Last.fm in 2012.

According to breach notification site LeakedSource, who obtained a copy of the database obtained in the hack, the details of 43,570,999 were obtained by the hacker who breached the service on March 22nd, 2012; at the time of the hack it was not known how many account details had been obtained but it was noted that it was believed that Last.fm has 40 million users at the time.

To make matters worse, while the passwords contained in the database were hashed, they were hashed using MD5, the encryption standard first invented in 1991. We noted, when political site Infowars was hacked, that MD5 is well known to have a “tremendous amount of vulnerabilities,” and has described as being “cryptographically broken,” meaning that LeakedSource took only two hours to crack more than 96 percent of the passwords from the database.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it turned out that many of the passwords were easy to guess anyway, with the most popular passwords including 123456, password, lastfm and 123456789.

Other data in the database included usernames, email addresses, join date, and other internal records including campaign hits, banned users, newsletter details, used invites, web player details, and similar.

Never ending story

The disclosure of details from the historical Last.fm hack can be added to a growing list of recent and historical hacks coming to light, including surprisingly many through LeakedSource, who claim to have even more databases to analyze before publishing the details.

As previously mentioned, details of the 2012 hack of online storage provider Dropbox came to light earlier this week, with others in previous weeks and months including MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Tumblr among others.

It’s become such a never ending story now that the easier exercise may be to create a list of sites and companies that haven’t been hacked in the last five years.

A full copy of all the stats from the hack are available from LeakedSource here.

Image credit: viirok/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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