3,000 email accounts compromised by hackers
The hackers managed to access the private emails of thousands of individuals whose details were then put on an Arabic website.
A number of Irish banking institutions, county councils, universities, the HSE and anti-virus software company Symantec were also on the list.
It is thought that hackers were accessing the accounts by tracing passwords.
People signing up to websites often use the same password for their email account.
By finding a vulnerable website, hackers can then trace the passwords back to an email account which can then be accessed.
Adrian Fleming, a software programmer, was one of the victims of the scam.
Speaking on the Today with Pat Kenny show, Mr Fleming said: “I couldn’t access my Gmail account but I didn’t take too much notice of it until I was on my way home when I got a phone call from my girlfriend asking me what I was talking about on Gtalk.”
Mr Fleming said the hacker then contacted his girlfriend through the email account asking for personal and financial details.
“When he was in, he made attempts to get at my PayPal details. He reset my Facebook password, my LinkedIn password, pretty much every account under the sun that I have.
“However, he did make several attempts at extracting funds from my PayPal account but he couldn’t get through the PayPal security either,” he said.
“We believe the vulnerability in some website in Ireland, given that all the addresses are Irish, some hacker was obviously able to exploit that vulnerability and harvest the database and get the passwords and user names,” he said.
The HSE and Bank of Ireland yesterday assured the public that their systems are secure.
