Passwords stolen from Mail.Ru were old, the company says

The 25 million account passwords stolen from Mail.Ru in a recently discovered hack were old and invalid, the Russian internet company said Wednesday.

“The security of our users wasn’t compromised in any way,” a Mail.Ru spokeswoman said in an interview.

The hack targeted forums for game projects that the company has acquired over the years. These include subdomains at cfire.mail.ru, parapa.mail.ru and tanks.mail.ru. Hackers stole passwords of users who participated in the forums.

However, the company said the stolen passwords were legacy data. None of them were related to current email accounts or other Mail.Ru services.

Hackers claimed to have stolen the data this month, and a copy of it was sent to LeakedSource, an online repository that monitors data breaches.

According to LeakedSource, the hackers carried out the attack by exploiting a known vulnerability in the vBulletin forum software.

On Wednesday, LeakedSource reported that gaming company Funcom had also been targeted in the same way.

Funcom later confirmed the breach. It has affected the forum accounts at TheSecretWorld.com, AgeofConan.com, Anarchy-Online.com and LongestJourney.com.

Funcom said email addresses, user names and encrypted passwords were stolen as part of the breach. However, game accounts, which are stored on separate servers, were not compromised.

Although Funcom has already patched the vBulletin vulnerability, it did so on Aug. 19. “We are unable to determine exactly when the data breach occurred prior to the fix,” the company said.

It also warned that the stolen passwords, though encrypted, might be possible to crack. The company is advising that users change those passwords if they were used for accounts other than Funcom.

LeakedSource has said one million users were affected in the Funcom breach.  The gaming company has temporarily shut down its forums and is investigating them for any other security issues.