Tens of Thousands Accounts of Infowars Hacked

Alex Jones, famous radio host as well as conspiracy theorist, created Infowars that produces radio, written pieces and documentaries. The dumped information relates to the Prison Planet TV that gives access to paying subscribers for a variety of content of Infowars. The data contains email addresses, usernames along with badly hashed passwords.

A representative said that database (db) of the breached account information from right-wing website Infowars as coming from 2012 breach, had already told the users regarding the breach.

The administrator of breach notification site Databases.Land provided a copy of 100,223 records to the Motherboard for the purpose of verification. However, every record seems to be included two times in the data, thus the actual user accounts number was around 50,000. Buckley Hamman of Infowars sent an email to Motherboard stating that, "we have cross referenced the current dump versus our current db, and it is data from an old breach that happened in 2012 and was dealt with at that time".

As per Motherboard, accounts are stored in the web database format called SQL. Hackers often breach SQL as it is simple to format databases requests, which have not been secured. Motherboard said that the passwords were secured by using an infamous easy-to-crack algorithm called MD5. (However, it is not confirmed that exactly how data was stolen from the website.)

Thehill.com posted on August 29th, 2016, quoting Hamman as saying that "we haven't used MD5 for almost five years". Hamman is working for the Infowars without having a specific job title.

One of those sites hosting user db listed that the data was coming from 2014. However, several databases sold or else promoted as the new breached data are fake - either taken from the already-leaked data of correct site, or combinations of data from other sites' leaks.

Users cannot be actually sure of the way a website can store its passwords. Thus, instead of taking a chance and just expecting that they are hashed properly, users should ensure that they sign up to the various services with exclusive passwords. This way, whenever one of the sites is hacked and its hashes are cracked, the damage will be mostly restricted to that site only.

» SPAMfighter News - 9/2/2016