What Happened
On September 22, 2013, the peer-to-peer file-sharing service iMesh was breached, exposing approximately 51 million user accounts. The compromised data included email addresses, usernames, passwords, IP addresses, location information, and join dates. The passwords were hashed and salted using the MD5 algorithm, which was already considered weak by 2013 and could be easily cracked. A Russian hacker known as “Peace” obtained the database and put it up for sale on dark web marketplaces in mid-2016, roughly three years after the initial breach. The leaked records showed that the majority of affected users were from the United States (13.7 million), followed by Turkey (4 million) and the United Kingdom (3.6 million).
