Analysis of the information found it had likely been collected from previous breaches, a practice that is not uncommon in the internet's black market for data, NBC News reported.
NBC news was able to find the documents containing the account information on Pastebin, a plain text site frequently used by hackers to dump their findings. Three of the documents constitute 277 email addresses from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, 20 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology , and nearly 7,000 from the World Health Organization. All three organizations have been the subject of conspiracy theories blaming them for the spread of the coronavirus.
Analysis by Steve Ragan, a researcher at the internet infrastructure and cybersecurity firm Akamai Technologies, on some of the leaked email addresses found that they had all been leaked in previous breaches, indicating that whoever made the documents had simply searched for known emails with the WHO, WIV and Gates Foundation's domain names. In many cases, they dated back to hacks from years ago, like the Tumblr breach of 2013 or Dropbox in 2016.
Chatter about the existence of the info dump then moved around pro-Trump blogs, Reddit's r/conspiracy forum and right-wing Twitter accounts, which implored users to publicize any documents found by logging into the accounts. Even though those organizations don't appear to have suffered any data breaches, the existence of the documents serves as a wake-up call that anyone who works for those organizations may face online harassment and are particularly vulnerable if they still use that same password with any of their accounts.Bad actors using exposed passwords to log onto different websites is a technique that has fueled some of the most infamous data breaches in recent years.
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