Over 2,771,673 online account credentials linked to employees of Fortune 500 companies leaked online
According to data analyzed by the VeriClouds research team, on average, one in 10 employees online account login credentials have been compromised to the dark, which means more than 2.7 million (2,771,673) personal credentials could have been compromised. These numbers have accumulated over the past three years and come from the largest available database of more than 8 billion stolen documents.
The VeriClouds team analyzed these compromised vouchers for different industries to which they belong, and some of the leaked vouchers in the industry could seriously affect their customers. For example, the financial industry and key infrastructure (such as energy).
Telecommunications, energy and financial sectors accounted for a higher proportion of leakage certificates, respectively, 23%, 18%, and 17%. Among them, the largest number of financial documents leaked more than 555,000. These figures are troubling because the larger the number of documents leaked by enterprises, the higher the risk of confidential data disclosure.
The VeriClouds team also noticed that almost all of these leaked online account information was related to the employee’s corporate email address. This fact helps to increase the availability of credentials that cybercriminals can use to launch attacks on businesses. In addition, the existence of voucher sales in dark webs has also greatly increased the availability of these vouchers.
Personal online account login credentials can be used by cybercriminals to launch “spear phishing” attacks on their devices. Employees may also be exposed to additional risk to their organization if they are authorized by the organization to access their workforce using personal devices.
In some cases, even top Fortune 500 companies control the disclosure of employee vouchers, especially if employees choose to use corporate email addresses to create third-party online service accounts.
Once a third-party online service platform has been invaded by cybercriminals, their user credentials are bound to be compromised. If exactly these users come from these businesses and use the same credentials for their corporate email login, the consequences can be extremely serious.
VeriClouds conducted a security survey in the second half of last year against customers of a major airline. The survey revealed that approximately 13.1% of compromised passwords found on the Darknet match the passwords currently being used by airline customers.
Another study shows that compared with 2016, the number of online account login documents leaked by the Fortune 500 companies to Darkets in 2017 decreased by 7.5% as a whole. Among them, the engineering construction, aerospace and defense, and financial sectors decreased by 19.5%, 17.2%, and 7.7% respectively.
The exact reason for the decline is unclear, but VeriClouds notes that some of the well-known dark mesh document vendors have disappeared from the market in 2017.
Correspondingly, the number of vouchers that leaked in the telecommunications, media and wholesale industries in 2017 increased by 22.4%, 5.0%, and 2.3% respectively.
