SSD was confiscated from the owner of LeakedSource, servers were arrested

The popular site LeakedSource, which allowed searching for personal information in the Vkontakte password bases, Mail.ru, Rambler, Last.fm, Linkedin, Dropbox, Myspace and many other sites, stopped work. One of the knowledgeable hackers under the nickname LTD first reported on the OGF forum that the site LeakedSource will no longer work ever. He apologized to members of the community who do not have their local copies of databases with user passwords.

“LeakedSource is closed forever and will not return. At the home of the owner of the site came out with a search this morning. He was not arrested, but all SSDs were confiscated, and the LeakedSource servers were seized as part of a federal investigation. If he recovers some information and is able to run again, then I will be wrong. But I am not mistaken, ”wrote LTD in a message on the forum on January 26, 2017.


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The past few days have shown that LTD, most likely, was right. LeakedSource site has not yet been restored. LeakedSource owner account on Twitter is not updated since January 10 .

From the message on the forum, it seems that American law enforcement agencies have searched the hacker’s house, although he himself had previously stated that he seemed to be in another jurisdiction .

Site users who have paid for access to password databases can hardly count on a refund. The offensive should be the one who has just issued an annual subscription for $ 320 ... One of the participants in the discussion at the forum admitted that his friend did it 5 minutes before the site was closed.

However, most users bought access for 24 hours only when it was necessary to break through a particular person through the bases, so they lost only $ 4.

LeakedSource was the most famous site that published confidential data of users of hacked sites. Often, stolen password databases first appeared here, and the fact of publication on LeakedSource was the most convincing evidence that a particular site actually underwent a successful hacker attack, and user credentials went into open access. Access to information paid thousands, if not tens of thousands of users.



On LeakedSource there was an archive with about 3 billion accounts from different services. New password databases came from various sources, including hackers themselves, who carried out hacks. Most of the bases were not private, they could be found in other places. Many have local copies, but still it was very convenient to use the site: the search here worked faster than the local disk grep.

LeakedSource opened at the end of 2015 and was able to live a little over a year. The site owner still retains his anonymity .

LeakedSource users do not need to return to grep. There are alternative services that largely duplicate the functionality of LeakedSource. For example, the site https://leakbase.pw is very similar in search capabilities, and it is even cheaper ($ 1 per day, $ 18 per month), although not as many password bases have been indexed here, as it was on LeakedSource. There is also searchdata.online and some others. After all, there is the Have I Been Pwned website for checking your personal data for leaks - a project by well-known information security specialist Troy Hunt. Although none of them, of course, can not be compared with the LeakedSource in terms of information.


Indexed password bases Have I Been Pwned

It is said that the closure of LeakedSource was quite expected. The site has become too popular and noticeable. Almost after all the major hacks of 2016, user bases soon appeared on LeakedSource - this was the case with FriendFinder Networks, VerticalScope, Last.fm, LinkedIn, DailyMotion and Rambler. Moreover, last year was a record for the number of leaks user accounts. According to Risk Based Security , last year hackers managed to get 4 billion 281 million user accounts on various sites as a result of 4149 hacks.

More than half of the accounts last year came from Myspace and Yahoo. The first one was hacked in 2013, and in 2016, more than 400 million accounts were posted. The second one was broken in 2013 and 2014, more than 1 billion and 500 million accounts appeared online, respectively.

In addition, smaller leaks contributed to Mail.ru (25 million compromised entries), LinkedIn (167 million), Tumblr (65 million), VK (170 million), VerticalScope (45 million) and Last.fm (43 million ).

Troy Hunt believes that the LeakedSource business for selling user personal information was questionable. It's one thing to show the injured person what information about him has leaked into open access (as Troy Hunt does), and another thing is to sell this information to everyone who wants it, including password hashes (and passwords recovered from hashes), date of birth, IP address, etc. Especially if we are talking about sites with intimate acquaintances - it is ugly to do so. Not to mention the legality of the sale of stolen goods.

On the other hand, LeakedSource brought real benefits. For example, in June 2016, he helped Twitter identify users who might be affected by the Myspace password leak.