Now would be a good time for you to change your e-mail passwords as a security expert has told Reuters that hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for e-mail accounts and other websites are being traded in Russia’s criminal underworld.
According to Alex Holden, founder and Chief Information Security Officer of Hold Security, researchers at his company has discovered that roughly 272.3 million accounts were stolen from e-mail services Mail.ru, Google’s GMail, Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Outlook.
The latest discovery in the major hack came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum about his deeds and was planning to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up totalling 1.17 billion records. Out of that 1.17 billion, Holden estimates that the cache of stolen accounts contains nearly 57 million Mail.ru accountsm tens of millions of credentials for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo, as well as hundreds of thousands of accounts at German and Chinese e-mail providers.
So far, Mail.ru has been notified of the break-in and will be warning users who might have been affected once they’re done checking if any of the stolen credentials are still active. Microsoft has also commented on the hack, stating that such an event was an unfortunate reality. Yahoo and Google have yet to comment on the matter.
Source: Reuters