Hacked ICANN data for sale on black market
If you were a user of ICANN’s Centralized Zone Data Service back in 2014 you may wish to think about changing some passwords today.
ICANN has confirmed that a bunch of user names and hashed passwords that were stolen in November 2014 have turned up for sale on the black market.
The batch reportedly contains credentials for over 8,000 users.
ICANN said yesterday:
ICANN recently became aware that some information obtained in the spear phishing incident we announced in 2014 is being offered for sale on underground forums. Our initial assessment is that it is old data and that no new breach of our systems has occurred. The data accessed in the 2014 incident breach included usernames and hashed passwords for our Centralized Zone Data System (CZDS). Once the theft was discovered, we reset all user passwords, and urged users to do the same for any other accounts where they used the same passwords.
While CZDS users have all presumably already changed their CZDS passwords, if they are still using that same password for a non-CZDS web site they may want to think about changing it.
ICANN first announced the hack back in December 2014.
It said at the time that the Government Advisory Committee’s wiki, and a selection of other less interesting pages, had also been compromised.
The attackers got in after a number of ICANN staffers fell for a spear-phishing attack — a narrowly targeted form of phishing that was specifically aimed at them.
If you email with ICANN staff with any regularity you will have noticed that for the last several months your email subject lines get prefixed [EXTERNAL] before the staffer receives them.
That’s to help avoid this kind of attack being successful again.
Your multi-steakholder model at work.
Perhaps Yahoo! that suffered multiple account hacks is also operating in multi-steakholder model ? #ohwait