Are You One Of The 250 Million Email Accounts Breached
Who discovered it and can it affect you?
Are you one of the 250 million email accounts breached? Well Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security found this discovery. Holden was previously in uncovering some of the world’s biggest known data breaches, affecting tens of millions of users at Adobe Systems, JPMorgan, and Target exposing them to subsequent cyber crimes.The latest discovery came after Hold Security researchers found a young Russian hacker bragging in an online forum that he had collected and was ready to give away a far larger number of stolen credentials that ended up around some 1.17 billion records.
Yahoo Mail credentials numbered 40 million, or 15% of the 272 million unique IDs discovered. Others, 33 million, or 12%, were Microsoft Hotmail accounts and 9%, or nearly 24 million, were Gmail, according to Holden. Holden says efforts to identify the hacker spreading the current data and sources of the stolen accounts would have exposed the investigative methods of his researchers and crew.
“This information is potent. It is floating around in the underground and this person has shown he’s willing to give the data away to people who are nice to him, and these credentials can be abused multiple times,” said Holden. But this still Begs the Question, Are you one of the 250 million email accounts breached?
What can you do?
- Change your passwords if you suspect that they may have been stolen,
- Change your passwords if you have any accounts that share the same password, and DON’T DO IT AGAIN
- Consider using two-factor authentication
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