Russia’s Yandex faces leak of 1 million users’ e-mail passwords

A list of passwords of more than 1 million users of e-mail resource of Russia’s Yandex has leaked out, one of the authors of a resource HabraHabr said Monday.

“A base of e-mail addresses with passwords from Yandex e-mail boxes has been released today on a rather known resource. The base is a text document containing 1 million positions,” the author said.

The Federal Service for Communications, IT, and Mass Communication Oversight will check the leak if it receives corresponding complaints from users.

“Passwords themselves are not personal data of users, because they could not help to identify a person. But if users think that their personal data was not duly protected they can address the service, and it will conduct a check on requests,” the watchdog’s spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky said.

Yandex said that 85% of the leaked passwords from e-mail boxes were either out of use or created by robots. “We had already known about 85% of the compromised accounts: most of them have already popped up in similar lists for several years. We have warned their owners and offered them to change passwords, but they have not done it. It means that such accounts are either abandoned, or were created by robots,” Yandex said in a statement.
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