UPDATED 00:31 EST / DECEMBER 06 2016

APPS

85M Dailymotion accounts hacked in the year’s latest cyberattack

Video site Dailymotion is the latest big hacking target, as the details of 85.2 million account holders have made their way online.

The hack of the Vivendi SA-owned YouTube competitor, first reported by data breach notification LeakedSource, includes unique email addresses and usernames from the company’s systems. Only 18.3 million accounts had associated passwords with them, which were scrambled using bcrypt hashing function, making them difficult to crack versus easier to crack passwords that are hashed with SHA1 or MD5. Unlike recently discovered attacks, the Dailymotion hack is believed to quite recent, about Oct. 20 this year, which explains why the passwords had better encryption.

The identity of the hackers is unknown at this stage. ZDNet verified the breach independently and did find several plain-text passwords matching the encrypted ones. In one case, the email address and password combination was unique to Dailymotion.

Founded in 2005, Dailymotion is the world’s second most visited video site with 128 million monthly unique visitors a month as of its acquisition in June 2015, although its Alexa ranking since that time has from a high of 85th most popular website online to 113th.

The news of another big hack rounds out a busy year in hacking that has seen billions of account users details make their way online from various companies. Among them were MySpace with 427 million accounts breached, FriendFinder Networks with 412 million, LinkedIn with 167 million, Formspring with 28 million and Dropbox with 68 million. Countless others included Twitter, Weebly, FourSquare, Rambler, Last FM, Mail.Ru, Dota2, Epic Games, VerticalScope, Clash of Kings and VK.com.

Dailymotion has so far not commented on the hack, which is considered by some to be in poor form especially given the potential number of customers affected. However, it does use modern encryption, which will make it unlikely user passwords can be cracked and used.

Image courtesy of Dailymotion

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