Daily Motion hacked with 85 million credentials leaked

Poor man's YouTube cracked. User names and passwords spilled

Daily Motion, the video sharing website not dissimilar to YouTube, has reportedly been hacked with details of its 85.2 million users stolen.

User names, email addresses and some hashed passwords were all exposed in the attack, according to LeakedSource, the hacking website that provides a database of almost three billion cracked records.

The passwords, however, were hashed with the Bcrypt algorithm with 10 rounds of rekeying, to the company's credit. The passwords will therefore not be easy to crack - or, at least, not as easy as passwords hashed using older or obsolete algorithms, such as SHA1 or MD5.

Representatives from both Daily Motion and Vivendi have so far not responded to requests for comment.

The Paris, France-based website, 90 per cent owned by French media giant Vivendi with telecoms company Orange hold a ten per cent stake, also has offices in London and San Francisco, but is very much a minnow alongside Google-owned YouTube.

The attack on Daily Motion caps a year of increasingly frequent successful attacks on high-profile websites and services.

In November, recruiter Michael Page admitted that it had left personal details of applicants exposed on a development server used for testing by its IT services provider Capgemini.

The adult dating service AdultFriendFinder was hacked in November - and not for the first time - with the details of some 400 million accounts exposed in the process.

Perhaps most worrying of all, though, was the Tesco Bank hack - again, in November - in which the accounts of some 20,000 customers were exposed, with money being transferred from accounts in the process. The Bank blocked online transactions from accounts as a precaution for almost a week, and refunded affected customers.

A month earlier, an NHS trust in Lincolnshire was forced to shut down its IT systems and cancel hundreds of operations after a cyber attack, which it this week admitted was the work of the Globe2 ransomware.