Comcast Locks 200,000 User Accounts After Login Info Found Selling On 'Dark Web,' Not Filtered By Search Engines

Cable giant Comcast on Monday called out 200,000 of its customers to reset their login information following a suspected security breach.

It was on Saturday that a security researcher posted a screenshot of a dark web marketplace on Twitter which showed a portion of the accounts up for sale. The Dark Web is a collection of sites that are difficult to access publicly and cannot be found by search engines. Users usually require specialized software to visit dark web websites.

The announcement was made after the company found that email addresses and passwords of around 590,000 Comcast users were being sold online on the dark web over the weekend, reported security website CSO Online, which was first to report the story.  

The entire list containing email addresses and passwords hundreds of thousands of Comcast customers was listed for sale for $1,000, although the seller was willing to sell 100,000 email-password combinations for $300, reported the Washington Post.

Fortunately, only around 200,000 of those combinations were reportedly found to be active, meaning that over 60 percent of the list was based on outdated or false information, the company confirmed.

"The vast majority of the information that's out there was not accurate," a Comcast spokeswoman said.

 "We discovered that about a third of the 590,000 were accurate."

Comcast said the information was likely obtained through phishing, malware or customers visiting compromised sites. The company claimed that it had not been hacked and noted that none of its systems, networks or applications had been compromised in connection to the breach.

"There's no evidence that this is a breach, but we are working with the customers who were impacted to secure their account," Comcast spokeswoman Jenni Moyer said.

To protect its customers, Comcast locked down their accounts and required them to log in and verify their identity and reset their passwords, reported USA Today.

It's still unclear where exactly the data came from.