MOSCOW, September 10. /ITAR-TASS/. The leakage of passwords from e-mail services of Russian Internet companies Yandex and Mail.ru, as well as those of Google, was unlikely to be a virus attack, but rather a flaw in the insider data, Alexei Kovyrshin, CEO of processing company Chronopay, said Wednesday.

“There were official statements from the companies that perpetrators received the passwords via fishing and virus attacks. But in order to assemble such a quantity of passwords by the largest botnets (a network of virus-containing computers), it takes at least a year or two,” Kovyrshin said.

“Since the released passwords are mostly simple, it could mean a theft of a deciphered password base with the simplest of them to be decoded. It’s still unclear how the base got into the hands of perpetrators, but it could be either an interior leakage or a use of vulnerable software,” he said.

Kovyrshin said that the rationale behind the disclosure of the database is obscure, because such materials are usually sold and cost a lot.

On Monday, Internet edition HabraHabr reported that a list of more than 1 million passwords of Yandex e-mail users leaked. Mail.ru faced a disclosure of 4.7 million passwords.

Google discovered that 5 million passwords and logins from its e-mail service Gmail had leaked out as well.