SAN FRANCISCO —User names and e-mail addresses of 20 million visitors to a dating site based in Russia have been hacked and offered for sale online, according to Daniel Ingevaldson, chief technology officer at Easy Solutions Inc, which makes fraud-detection software. The dating site, Topface, did not respond to a request for comment. Ingevaldson said it is no longer clear that users’ passwords were also taken, as he originally told Bloomberg. But hackers can use such credentials to try to access bank accounts, health records, and other sensitive data, he said. He issued a statement about the breach after seeing a posting by the thief, who used the alias “Mastermind,” on an online forum used by cybercriminals. Fifty percent of the credentials were for people in Russia, and 40 percent came from the European Union. Ingevaldson said such personal information usually sells quickly to fraudsters who use automated software programs to find other sites where people used the same information they did to access the dating site, to help them build a more complete profile of the fraud target.
— BLOOMBERG NEWS