As organizations like WHO, CDC, and hospitals are critical for handling the ongoing pandemic, these have turned as a sweet-spot for hackers to breach in. Though cybersecurity experts have long been warning those organizations for potential hacks, unknown activists have somehow pooled thousands of login credentials of officials at healthcare and other services and dumped the online to initiate any attacks.
Over 25,000 Credentials Free To Fake
This was discovered by a SITE, a cyber Intelligence group that detected a URL in 4chan, an internet forum for political hate speech. The URL was redirected to a database in Pastebin, which contained over 25,000 email addresses and passwords relating to several officials. The clear breakup was like 5,120 credentials belonging to World Bank officials, 9,938 credentials of NIH, 6,857 of CDC, 2,732 of WHO, and few from Gates Foundation, which is operated by Bill and Melinda Gates. WHO admitted that more number of credentials than reported by SITE was leaked earlier, it confirmed that only 457 of were active. And as a precaution, passwords for those emails have been reset. Further, Gates Foundation said they’re investigating the matter, but other organizations like CDC, NIH, and World bank haven’t made a comment yet. Few security researchers claimed some of the credentials were true, making the issue more intriguing. Many in forums have shared this data onto Twitter and Telegram apps where more neo-Nazis and extremists are crafting conspiracy theories to fuel the worst of COVID-19 pandemic. Source – DailyMail
