WASHINGTON–The FBI says it is pursuing a Russian hacker who claims to have stolen more than 1.2 billion unique e-mail and password combinations and who further claims to have hacked numerous Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The FBI said in its application for a search warrant that it is seeking “information associated with mistergrey@live.ru that is stored at premises controlled by Microsoft.” The search warrant became public as the result of proceedings in federal court in Milwaukee, according to Reuters.
The FBI investigation followed an announcement by Alex Holden, CISO of Hold Security in Milwaukee, who was the first to warn in August 2014 that he had discovered "what could be arguably the largest data breach known to date." Hold Security dubbed the group it alleges is behind the crime as “CyberVor,”– "vor" is Russian for thief–and said the gang amassed the stolen credentials at least in part by scanning websites for known flaws, such as SQL injection vulnerabilities. In the process the individual or group assembled the 1.2 billion username and password combinations, more than 500,000 e-mail addresses and 4.5 billion records in total.
In its search warrant, the FBI said it has been in contact with Holden seeking additional information. Holden reportedly shared 263 gigabytes of raw text files with the FBI.