The stolen records of 20 million users of a popular Android app store have been published online by a hacker who claims to have 19 million more.
Not all app stores are the same. Android users have access to the official Google Play Store, complete with nearly three million (2,870,985) apps available for download. Then there are the manufacturer app stores, of which the best known are probably the Samsung Galaxy Store and the Huawei AppGallery.
Finally, we arrive at the third-party app stores, the ones not pre-installed by the smartphone vendor nor operated by Google. Among the biggest of these, with a claimed global userbase of 150 million and a million apps, is Aptoide. It is Aptoide that would appear to have been breached by a hacker who claims to have stolen 39 million customer records and has published details of 20 million of them, including login emails and hashed passwords, on a popular hacker forum.