Login information for a large number of Mega accounts has been compromised
Mega, a company founded in New Zealand that provides online cloud storage and files hosting services, is currently found to have thousands of account credentials on its platform that have been publicly posted online. The leaked information is provided as a text file. It is understood that this text file contains more than 15,500 usernames, passwords, and file names, which means that these accounts have been abnormally logged in, and the file name in the account is also crawled.
This text file was first discovered by Patrick Wardle, chief research officer and co-founder of Digita Security, on the malware analysis website VirusTotal in June, the document was uploaded a few months ago by a user allegedly in Vietnam.
ZDNet said that they have verified these accounts and confirmed that the data comes from Mega. By contacting multiple users, it is also determined that these emails, passwords and some files are used on the Mega.
According to Troy Hunt, administrator of the “Have I Been Pwned” website, the data was not obtained by directly invading the Mega, but was crashed. He said that 98% of the email addresses in the file already exist in his database (collected in previous vulnerabilities).
ZDNet also said that five of the people they contacted said they used the same password on different websites. He doesn’t know who created this list or how it was crawled. Although Mega provides end-to-end encryption, it does not use two-factor authentication when logging in, so an attacker can log in to each account using the login credentials and fetch the file name of the file in the account.
Stephen Hall, chairman of Mega, said that:
“Mega has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse materials. Any reports result in links being deactivated immediately, the user’s account closed and the details provided to the authorities.Mega can’t act as censor by examining content as it is encrypted at the user’s device before being transferred to Mega. As well as it being technically impossible, it is also practically infeasible for Mega and other major cloud storage providers, with 100s of files being uploaded each second.”
This is not the first time Mega has encountered a security issue. In 2016, hackers claimed to have acquired internal Mega documents by exploiting security vulnerabilities in their servers. The hacker also stated that he had obtained seven email addresses associated with the administrative account. Stephen Hal stated that no user data was compromised at the time.
Source: ZDNet
