The leaked database includes accounts linked to the government and important Vietnamese businesses.
Vietnam’s computer emergency response center is urging local internet users to change email and social media passwords after a huge database of unencrypted user credentials was discovered online.
Security experts found the 41-gigabyte archive containing over 1.4 billion email addresses, passwords, and other credentials in plain text on the Dark Web early this month.
At least 437,664 accounts in the database have been identified as belonging to users in Vietnam, including 930 government accounts and many important Vietnamese businesses, the national center VNCERT at the information ministry said in a warning on Monday.
The accounts were leaked from various social networks and online service sites, including the popular LinkedIn, MySpace and Netflix, it said.
The file found is not the result of a new data breach, but a collection of those from several past breaches, collated into a single database which was updated at the end of November.
The archive includes some of the commonly used weak passwords such as “123456,” “123456789,” “password,” and “111111.”
None of the passwords are encrypted, the California-based identity threat intelligence company 4iQ, which discovered the database, said in an online post.
It said the “scary” part is that it has tested a subset of these passwords and most of them have been verified to be true.
It is still unclear who is behind the collection. But VNCERT said the breach will lead to data theft and destruction, and recommended users to use strong passwords and change them regularly.
Source: Chau An