15.8 million PayPal accounts in danger: stolen passwords put up on the market

A hacker going by the identify Chucky_BF has allegedly stolen particulars for 15.8 million PayPal accounts and is promoting them on an web discussion board at a cut price value of simply $750 USD. The treasure trove of information, which is being saved in a TXT file, is claimed to be 1.1 GB in dimension. Nonetheless, the authenticity of the PayPal information has not but been confirmed.

You may see a screenshot of the provide on this social media publish . In line with the hacker, the PayPal passwords can be found in plain textual content and the e-mail addresses of those PayPal accounts originate from Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and varied country-specific domains.

How the stolen PayPal information was acquired

As of this writing, the hacker hasn’t mentioned the place the info got here from or how a lot of it’s nonetheless updated.

On this social media publish, well-known safety skilled Troy Hunt suspects that the hacker didn’t steal the info instantly from PayPal’s servers since PayPal doesn’t retailer passwords in plaintext. Almost definitely they have been taken from customers, maybe through infostealer malware.

In line with safety web site Hackread, which checked a few of the information, there are some take a look at accounts and faux accounts interspersed among the many PayPal accounts, however many are real.

Trying on the PayPal Newsroom, the corporate has not but issued an announcement about this as of this writing.

Right here’s what it is best to do now

You probably have a PayPal account, it is best to instantly go examine your transaction historical past and account settings for any suspicious exercise. You must also change your PayPal password ASAP—and when you use the identical password for different accounts, it is best to change these account passwords as nicely. Think about your password compromised.

Additional studying: Cautious! That PayPal electronic mail could possibly be a phishing rip-off