In early September, reports of a massive Gmail password breach came to light across the globe. In all, there were up to 5 million stolen Gmail accounts and passwords and all were published on a Russian forum.
Luckily, many of the passwords do not match the Gmail accounts with which they are associated. Google announced that only 1 to 2 % of the passwords match and that it has secured those. It has also stated that its systems were not breached in any way. But, the damage is done and another breach has occurred.
It could be that passwords stolen from previous security breaches such as Adobe or LinkedIn happened to be the same ones that people used for Gmail and the hacker put together different data sets to come up with this list.
In mid-September, Russia’s largest email providers mail.ru and Yandex were hit by data breaches. Around 5 million mail.ru email accounts and 1 million Yandex email accounts were breached and passwords released on Russian forums. The companies said that their systems were not compromised and these accounts were stolen using phishing attacks. The analysis of these accounts showed that they were at least partially genuine.
In what seemed to be a busy month for hackers, JP Morgan Chase announced that over 76 million households in the US were affected by a breach that compromised personal contact information like addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.
No matter how many times breaches happen all over the globe, you can always check to see if your personal email address has been compromised. By downloading Avira’s Identity Safeguard to your mobile device, you can instantly scan the Avira database and check to see if you’re identity has been compromised. To check your email address, download the free Identity Safeguard app for Avira’s iOS or Android mobile apps.
