Hackers are selling over 5,00,000 Zoom accounts on the dark web and hacker forums for less than a penny each, and in some cases, for free according to a recent report by web platform Bleeping Computer .

Bleeping computer in the report said that they had first been informed of these accounts being posted on said platforms by cybersecurity intelligence firm Cyble who started noticing the posts around April 1.

The firm had then reached out to the sellers who had put up the account for sale and had bought credentials for 530,000 Zoom accounts at $0.0020 (approximately ₹ 0.15) for a single account in an attempt to warn the customers of the breach.

Findings

According to the report, the accounts were hacked using credential stuffing attacks. Hackers use previously leaked accounts to login to the Zoom app. The credentials that enable them to successfully log into the app are then compiled and put up for sale on the dark web.

These credentials include email address, passwords, personal meeting URLs, and HostKeys, as per the report. Almost 290 accounts from the hacked accounts were related to universities and colleges, it said.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, Zoom had said that the company is already working on finding these password dumps to reset affected users' passwords, the report said.

This is not the first instance of hackers zeroing in on the video-conferencing app that has gained massive popularity owing to global shutdowns in light of the coronavirus pandemic. According to a recent report by Motherboard, hackers have been cashing in on Zoom’s ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities and selling data stolen from the app on the dark web.

‘Zero-day’ vulnerabilities are faults in software that hackers can use to target specific users. The price for zero-day vulnerabilities in Zoom on the dark web ranges from $5,000 to $30,000, the report said.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan had recently held a Livestream conference acknowledging the privacy and security issues within the app ensuring that the company was working on fixing them.

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