Breach Disclosure: Universarium

In November 2019, the Russian "Remote preparatory faculty for IT specialties" Universarium suffered a data breach. The breach included 565,000 email addresses and passwords in plain text according to reports. This data was found on various forums for data breaches, and contrary to the reporting, the passwords were not included in the leak, however, users’ phone numbers were included, for a total of 568,784 users.

Recommendations

If not already enabled, turn on the compromised credentials rule for all relevant entities and ensure relevant emails are entered for those entities, or reach out to [email protected] for assistance
If one of your entities receives an alert, ZeroFOX recommends immediate password changes for the affected account
Enable 2-factor authentication for all of your organizational accounts to help mitigate phishing and credential stuffing attacks

Details

As early as November 16th, 2019 a user on a popular hacking site uploaded the breach which included the 568,784 rows of data, as well as provided sample data for verification, which included a majority of Russian based email addresses. The user who uploaded this said the passwords were not included in the database due to an unknown hashing format, and that the database was obtained from the admin panel of the hosting site.

The author of the post on the site stated that the dump did include the user’s email, their full name, as well as phone number. Even without passwords, this data can still be used for future attacks by targeting users through phone or email and by knowing their full name.