Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
Exclusive to The Middle East Online
Edited by Nelly Tawil
A recent password hack of 360 million accounts on the social media platform MySpace has prompted the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to warn users to delete old and unused accounts.
MySpace announced in a blog posted on its website that user login data was made available on an online hacker forum, in recent weeks.
A portion of accounts created before June 11, 2013 had login data stolen from the old MySpace platform.
“We believe the data breach is attributed to Russian Cyberhacker Peace,” Myspace said.
“This same individual is responsible for other recent criminal attacks, such as those on LinkedIn and Tumblr, and has claimed on the paid hacker search engine, LeakedSource, that the data is from a past breach.”
Email addresses, MySpace usernames and MySpace passwords were stolen in the hack.
MySpace informed the public that measures had been taken to invalidate all user passwords for the affected accounts created prior to the date, and users would need to authenticate their accounts.
Due to the recent attacks, the AFP has reminded people to consider deleting old accounts to avoid identity theft.
“Personal details could potentially fall into the hands of marketers looking to spam you, or worse still, by criminals to commit fraud,” it said on Facebook.
“Keep yourself safe online — delete all your old user accounts and consider changing your passwords.”
In a statement, the AFP said all internet users should be aware that virtual strangers can obtain large amounts of personal information from photos, videos and posts.
