In one of the largest security breach, 5 million Gmail accounts hacked.
In what could be dubbed as the largest security breach of the century, 5 million Gmail accounts were hacked by Russian cyber criminals, who put up a list of the compromised accounts on a popular Russian website – Bitcoin Security. According to reports, at the time of the leak, almost 60% of the accounts were active with most of the account holders being English, Russian or Spanish.
Concerns for users grew since Google uses one account for all their services, which include Gmail, Google Drive, Google Plus, YouTube and Google Maps. The accounts were posted on btcsec.com, a Russian bitcoin forum, by a user named Tvskit.
Commenting on the issue, a representative from Google said, “The security of our users’ information is a top priority for us. We have no evidence that our systems have been compromised, but whenever we become aware that accounts may have been, we take steps to help those users secure their accounts.”
While it is not still clear whether Gmail was hacked or the cyber criminals phished and combed the passwords from malware-infected computers, Google claimed that only 2% of the passwords are still valid. In a blog post, Google also said that its automatic anti-hijacking system would block many of the login attempts.
To check if your account was among those that were hacked, you can use this tool. It is safe and reliable, but however, if you are still wary of giving your email address, you can use up to 3 asterisk to mask your account name. For example, you can type ex***le1234@gmail.com for example1234@gmail.com.
Additionally, you can add a two-step authorization to make sure your account isn’t compromised in the future.
