Researchers Harvest, Analyze 100K Cybercrime Forum Credentials

Cybersecurity researchers running a sprawling information-stealer campaign collected credentials, autofill data, and system information that tied back to about 100,000 users with memberships to well-known cybercrime forums.

Besides gathering identity, location, and IP address data associated with various cybercrime forum members, the Hudson Rock research team also scraped passwords that had been saved as part of the autofill feature.

Hudson Rock has a tool that measures the strength of breached passwords and found cybercrime forums broadly maintain better password protection than many critical infrastructure networks. An analysis found the Dark Web forum with the strongest overall user passwords was Breached.to, while the weakest passwords were found on Russian-language forum Rf-cheats.ru.

“Overall, passwords from cybercrime forums are stronger than passwords used for Government websites,” the report said, “and exhibit fewer ‘very weak’ passwords than industries like the military.”