The database of the Russian-language cybercrime forum YouHack, which was hacked back in 2013, has once again attracted attention after it was officially added to the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) platform. The incident once again demonstrated the ironic reality: even members of hacker forums neglect digital hygiene.
The database of the Russian-language cybercrime forum YouHack, which was hacked back in 2013, has once again attracted attention after it was officially added to the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) platform. The incident once again demonstrated the ironic reality: even members of hacker forums neglect digital hygiene.
An analysis of the leaked data revealed 7.2 million unique email addresses, The Register reports . Of these, about 107,000 belonged directly to forum participants. Their usernames, IP addresses, and passwords, mostly protected by unsalted MD5 hashes, were publicly available.
Unsalted MD5 is a poor choice for password protection. It calculates too quickly, allowing attackers to instantly guess combinations, and identical passwords produce identical hashes. This is hardly good digital hygiene for a hacker forum.
One would expect that participants in a cybercrime forum would be knowledgeable enough not to reuse passwords or register using an email address associated with their real identity. However, expectations and reality do not always coincide, as was clearly demonstrated by Alexander Kazes, the founder of AlphaBay, which at the time of its closure in 2017 was the largest trading platform on the darknet (many times larger than the famous Silk Road).
This data was later included in the massive 2024 mega-dump known as the “Mother of All Leaks” (12 TB, 26 billion records). The forum itself changed its domain after the 2013 incident and continues to operate.
