PHILADELPHIA, Nov. 9 (UPI) — Comcast has reset the passwords of thousands of customers after a list of of account email addresses and passwords was offered up for sale online.
The information cache of 590,000 names, addresses and passwords, the majority of which were obsolete, was available for $1,000 on the Dark Web, a network of websites that require authorization to access and is typically used as a marketplace for contraband or illegal commodities.
About 200,000 Comcast customers have been asked to reset their passwords. The company was alerted to the posting on Saturday. A company representative said no company systems had been compromised, and that it was actively involved in checking the list against its own database of customers.
About 30 percent of the data for sale was from active accounts, so the majority of the information was likely obtained through the accidental release of passwords by customers or recycled from past data breaches.
The weekend sale of the information received one customer, presumably Comcast, judging by the speed with which the company handled the list and reset passwords on the accounts, CSO reported Monday.
