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

A hacker going by the title Chucky_BF has allegedly stolen particulars for 15.8 million PayPal accounts and is promoting them on an web discussion board at a discount value of simply $750 USD. The treasure trove of knowledge, which is being saved in a TXT file, is alleged 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 supply 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 numerous country-specific domains.

How the stolen PayPal information was acquired

As of this writing, the hacker hasn’t stated 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 straight from PayPal’s servers since PayPal doesn’t retailer passwords in plaintext. Almost definitely they had been taken from customers, maybe by way of infostealer malware.

In line with safety website Hackread, which checked among the information, there are some check accounts and faux accounts interspersed among the many PayPal accounts, however many are real.

Wanting on the PayPal Newsroom, the corporate has not but issued a press release about this as of this writing.

Right here’s what it’s best to do now

In case you have a PayPal account, it’s best to instantly go examine your transaction historical past and account settings for any suspicious exercise. You also needs to change your PayPal password ASAP—and in case you use the identical password for different accounts, it’s best to change these account passwords as nicely. Contemplate your password compromised.

Additional studying: Cautious! That PayPal e mail may very well be a phishing rip-off