Comcast Resets 200k Compromised Email Passwords

Comcast, the U.S.-based cable and internet provider, claims to reset email passwords of 200,000 of its customer accounts following recent reports that suggested that the email addresses were being offered on sale on a Dark Web marketplace, Information week reported.

CSO Online broke the news that a security researcher @flanvel directed Salted Hash to a post that reportedly offered a list of 590,000 Comcast email addresses and corresponding passwords. The entire list was being offered for $1000.

“The name of the market [where the list was offered for sale] is "Python Market"...It is my assumption, though the facts are not decisive, the data was being recycled from previous dumps, or a collection of multiple dumps. Many scammers will try to resell data or pad the numbers to turn a larger profit," Flanvel wrote in an email to Information Week.

However, of the 590,000 email addresses, only about 200,000 were found to be active, and these were the ones that were reset, according to a company spokesperson. The spokesperson, however, denied a breach occurred for the current list, as reported by Information Week. The company is rather suggesting it to be a phishing scheme.

“We’re taking this seriously and we’re working to get this fixed for those customers who may have been impacted,” The Washington Post quoted a company spokesperson, “but the vast majority of information out there was invalid.”

Steve Ragan at CSO Online also made similar observation when he pointed out that as just 30 percent of the Comcast records being offered were active, the majority of the records were “almost certainly recycled”.  This implies that the active accounts identified by Comcast were “possible Phishing victims, had malware installed on their systems, or had their Comcast email and password exposed during one or more of the massive data breaches that have gone public over the last few years.”