Approximately 4.93 million Gmail usernames and passwords were published to a Russian Bitcoin forum on Tuesday, as first reported by Russian website CNews. That’s the bad news. The good news is that this leak doesn’t seem as massive upon further inspection.
First off, we got in touch with Google regarding the issue. The company does not believe this is the result of any sort of security breach on its end.
“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.”
Next, since the posting, the forum administrators have purged the passwords from the text file in question, leaving only the logins. Furthermore, if you want to check whether your account is included in the leak, you can head to isleaked.com and input your email address.
Upon closer inspection of the text file, it appears to combine older lists accumulated over a longer period of time. There could thus be a link to hacks of sites unrelated to Gmail, especially if users are picking the same usernames and passwords for other accounts.
As a result, this leak likely affects significantly fewer than 5 million users. Many have likely changed their passwords, and certain entries could be duplicates or simply invalid.
Google has taken steps to help them secure their accounts and given them usual recommendations to protect their devices from malware.
See also – Three years in, Google has paid researchers over $2 million in security rewards and fixed more than 2,000 bugs and Google begins offering financial rewards for proactive security patches made to select open-source projects
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