With that privileged access, Nikulin is said to have stolen the details of over 30 million users.
The Russian hacker successfully phished details from a worker at the now-extinct social network Formspring, which later rebranded itself as. In the meantime, another website had fallen victim to Nikulin. At first it was reported that the LinkedIn hack might have compromised 6.5 million user accounts, but – in May 2016 – a grand total of 117 million LinkedIn accounts, alleged to have been obtained from the 2012 hack, were put up for sale on a cybercrime forum. It had taken a similar length of time for the true scale of the LinkedIn hack to become public knowledge. That’s good advice, but it took another four years, in August 2016, for Dropbox to confirm the size of the breach it had suffered.
In a July 2012 blog post, Dropbox admitted that an undisclosed number of users’ email addresses had been exposed, after some users had complained about receiving spam.ĭropbox took the opportunity to remind users to use unique passwords, and enable two-factor authentication on their accounts. Unfortunately, Dropbox was apparently unaware of the true scale of the security breach at the time. He used details derived from the compromised LinkedIn databases to launch a successful phishing attack against a Dropbox employee – breaking into their account, and gaining access to sensitive data.īetween May and July 2012, Nikulin was able to amass the email addresses and hashed passwords for some 68,680,741 Dropbox accounts. High profile victims of the security breach, who had made the mistake of reusing their LinkedIn password elsewhere on the internet, included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, actor Jack Black, and social media influencer Kylie Jenner.įollowing the success of his LinkedIn hack, Nikulin was able to turn his attention to other targets. The poor security used by LinkedIn to store its passwords made it simple for them to be cracked, and for hackers to explore whether they would also unlock other online accounts. With his privileged access, Nikulin was able to access LinkedIn’s user database – which included email addresses, usernames, and passwords stored as notoriously weak non-salted SHA1 hashes. It had been four years since Nikulin had compromised the PC of a LinkedIn employee, and planted malware to steal their access credentials to the professional networking services internal systems.
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