Yesterday a hacked database of 25,460 Belgian email addresses appeared briefly on pastebin.ca. Our data breach spider indexed this leaked database before the post was removed.

The data we obtained did not contain passwords, only usernames and email addresses, however, the unknown hacker who published the data could well have obtained passwords and not published them in the release.

Analysis of the data revealed the following:

• 22% of records were Telenet.be email addresses
• 22% were Skynet.be addresses
• 3% were Pandora.be addresses
• and 3% were Scarlet.be addresses

The remaining records, we might assume, were lesser-known company domain names. We’re assuming they were company domain names as the most popular “First Name” record in the data was “Directie” (“Management” in Dutch).

Also, it appears that the most popular male name in Belgium is Marc … just in case you were wondering!

If you think you may have been part of this breach, check your email address here, or if you are a Belgium-based business, you can check your domain for breaches here to see if any of your company email addresses were involved in a breach.

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If your business has a data security policy, it might include things like a strong firewall, enterprise antivirus packages, encrypted Intranet, regular updates and restricted access to important folders.

But have you considered the biggest threat of all? Increasingly, it’s your employees’ behaviour that can make or break your business’s e-security.

So-called ‘insider threats’ can be just as destructive, if not moreso, than an outsider breaking in.

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If you were sitting on 10 million hacked usernames and passwords, would you show the world? Mark Burnett, an information security researcher hailing from Salt Lake City, Utah, has done just that.

His reasoning? “… to get good, clean and consistent data out in the world so others can find new ways to explore and gain knowledge from it.”

The colossal database was cobbled from various database dumps, primarily over the last 5 years. In a blog post detailing the share, Mr. Burnett addressed legal and ethical concerns about his actions.

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BreachAlarm has indexed over 227 million hacked accounts with data stretching back 8 years. This means, on average, we’re indexing around 70,000 hacked email/password combinations per day. This takes into account large breaches such as Adobe’s 150 million and eHarmony’s 34 million records. A more typical day sees us pick up 5k – 10k records.

Looking at a sample of our data, we’re seeing some interested trends:

• On average, when someone checks their email address with BreachAlarm, there’s a 41% chance they discover their email address and password has been compromised in a data breach.
• 45% of Gmail accounts, 42% of Hotmail accounts, and 30% of Yahoo email accounts checked on BreachAlarm have been breached.
• AOL and Comcast have suffered data breaches in the past 12 months, so we’ve seen a high percentage of these accounts breached. 55% of AOL and 58% of Comcast users have had their details compromised.
• People from Canada top the list as the most compromised, with 62% of tested emails showing up as breached. The Netherlands is next at 52%.
• Our data shows French email accounts appear to be the least compromised; we’re only seeing 22% of .fr email account being compromised.

That’s not to say that these stats are representative of all email addresses out there. Our data is most likely skewed because people who think or have been told they’ve been involved in a breach will often go in search of more information, find BreachAlarm, and check their email address.

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Yesterday we were made aware of two database breaches containing email and password combinations for predominantly German-based email accounts. One database was 11,235 records, the other 11,270 giving 22,505 breached records.

From these two databases, released by two different hacker sources, we found 9,870 email/password record pairs that were new to the BreachAlarm database. Email addresses from Web.de, GMX.de and t-online.de accounted for 43% of the records found, which is understandable as these are some of the largest German email account providers.

As always, we encourage you to check your email address to see if it was included in one of these breaches.

For more details on recent breaches, visit our sources page.

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