The provider of Email.it has suffered an attack and the data of its users, more than 600 thousand, have been put on sale in the dark web in exchange for bitcoin (BTC).
The story is older than expected: already in January 2018 criminals managed to recover user data from the Email.it datacenter requesting a bounty for the information recovered as a result of the breach.
The platform team did not give in to the threats and did not pay. So the criminals started to extort money to get a payment and at that point, the team reported it to the postal police, but it seems they still haven’t found the perpetrators.
Plan B for criminals who will accept Bitcoin
This triggered the criminals’ “plan b” which involved selling user data on the dark web for bitcoin (BTC).
As can be seen from the image, the hackers stole several Terabytes of data from the platform and there are several purchase options ranging from 0.5 BTC to 3 BTC to buy all the stolen material.
According to Email.it, this data would consist of “only” standard users’ data and not that of premium users who would be in a different database and would, therefore, be currently safe.
As can be seen, criminals continue to use cryptocurrencies, in this case, bitcoin, even though it is not an anonymous currency and criminals often prefer anonymous solutions like Monero (XMR) instead.
Recently, for example, some hackers have inserted malware in a photo of the singer Taylor Swift in order to install viruses on the PCs of users who decided to download the file, which illegally mined the crypto through the computers of the victims.
