Around 5 Million Gmail Address & Passwords Leaked
About 5 million Gmail usernames along with the passwords have been published to a Russian Bitcoin Community on the last Tuesday. It was first suspected and reported by CNews, a Russian website. Then it has been published in other technology news based websites. A few internet security experts had examined the leaked list and after testing it they claimed that those passwords that have been stolen and leaked are several years old. So Gmail hopes that it would not be a massive affect to their security breach. But it came to as a shocking news for Gmail as they have been considered as one o the most secured and analyzed electronic mail service providers in the world.
Gmail has clearly blown away any security issues. They do not believe that this is some sort of a result from their security issues. “The security of our users’ information is a top priority for us,” a Google spokesperson told TNW. “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.” Google operates the Gmail email service. The passwords have been exposed through the Bitcoin forum as a text file.
Analyzing the text file, it has been found that it contains mainly English, Russian and Spanish accounts. But the good news is these leaked information are quite old; which means that in the meantime Gmail users had changed and edited their accounts while some of them had suspended those particulars accounts. So if you are a Gmail user and need to check whether yours one is among the leaked list or not, then you can go to https://isleaked.com/, input your Gmail address and check. But the best thing would be to change your password as sometimes that does not work perfectly.
But how the information got exposed? In theory, it might be stolen from different other sites like eHarmony or LinkedIn as passwords from sites like these are appeared to be linked to Gmail addresses.
But Google has made a bold claim that it is not because of Gmail’s security vulnerability. They also said that not all of the mail addresses are of Gmail. “It’s important to note that in this case and in others, the leaked usernames and passwords were not the result of a breach of Google systems,” Google published on its blog post. “Often, these credentials are obtained through a combination of other sources.”
Google has also checked all the leaked passwords and claimed to find only one or two percent of all the stolen credentials worked for the service. So they are hoping that no Gmail account is in danger of exposed or hacked at this point. Already Google has stepped up to help them in securing the victims’ accounts by giving them necessary recommendations to save their Gmail accounts from malware. In the last three years, Google had paid more than $2 million as security rewards and also fixed over two thousand bugs.