this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Yea just got the alert that one of my old email addresses was affected
Does that mean the malware was once on your system?
I doubt it. Probably just means some website i signed up to using that email was compromised and had all their data leaked.
The blog post regarding this "dump" suggests that it was actually from malware, so the answer to "Does that mean malware was once on your system?" is likely to be Yes. https://www.troyhunt.com/processing-23-billion-rows-of-alien-txtbase-stealer-logs/
Likely perhaps, but this email address hasn't been actively used by me in over a decade, which means either this dataset is extremely old, or maybe the holders of the data had been compromised by malware when they were attempting to gain access to whatever website. Who knows?
And since it was a singular address, and none of my other addresses were affected, im able to determine the timeline of when I was affected by this. Its during an era where this email address was involved with many data breaches.
There are 23 billion records in this stealer log, with only 284 million unique entries.
my email has been in several breaches, for example trillian chat that i have never even heard of, and some virtual keyboard i definitely have not installed.....should i suspect malware?
For stealerlogs yes, it means malware was on your system, and exfiltrated data, typically from your browsers.
I don't think that's guaranteed to be true.
A very old email of mine which I haven't used in many years was in the breach.
None of my other email addresses were in there, so it's highly unlikely that I was affected by this malware in the last decade.
That email has been in many other breaches however, so I wouldn't be surprised if somebody who had access to an old dump was infected.
My money's on some random skid who downloaded an old database dump and got infected when they downloaded some bad warez.
Either that, or this includes credentials from people who had the malware 15+ years ago.
Then they must have tried your password and saved it to one of a specific number of places. Infostealers are by definition a class of malware, which means it's got to be installed somewhere with access to the directory storing the credential.
Or it was from an old computer, or mislabeled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3f9do5mtT8
Here's a good talk on infostealers for anyone curious.