Myspace Breach Hits 360M Users

Right before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, hackers were hard at work gaining unauthorized access to the systems of social networking site Myspace and making stolen user login data available online.

On Tuesday (May 31), Myspace’s parent company, Time Inc., confirmed that the compromised data included usernames, passwords and email addresses created prior to the release of the site’s new security measures on June 11, 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The website is currently in the process of notifying impacted users and working with law enforcement to investigate the breach. It has also invalidated affected users’ passwords.

“We believe the data breach is attributed to Russian cyberhacker ‘Peace.’ This same individual is responsible for other recent criminal attacks, such as those on LinkedIn and Tumblr, and has claimed on the paid hacker search engine LeakedSource that the data is from a past breach. This is an ongoing investigation, and we will share more information as it becomes available,” Myspace said in a blog post.

News of the Myspace hack comes just weeks after another social network, LinkedIn, announced the scope of a data breach it experienced back in 2012 is actually much worse than the company initially thought.

LinkedIn recently discovered that email and password information for more than 100 million LinkedIn members has been released as part of the data breach that was initially believed to have only impacted 6.5 million accounts.

In order to contain the breach impact, LinkedIn has requested that its users who joined prior to the breach change their passwords. In fact, the company said they have “begun to invalidate passwords for all accounts created prior to the 2012 breach that haven’t updated their password since that breach.”

The company has also released a note about the impact of those who are making stolen password data available, saying it “will evaluate potential legal action if they fail to comply.” LinkedIn is also using automated tools to up its security measures and block any potential suspicious activity.