5 million stolen Gmail user names and passwords have leaked online

5 million stolen Gmail user names and passwords have leaked online

No, iCloud isn’t the only popular online service that runs into security problems every now and then. FreedomHacker brings us word that roughly 5 million different Gmail user names and passwords have been posted online on a Russian Bitcoin forum and it looks like phishing scammers are already using the leak to lure in unsuspecting users to enter in their user names and passwords into websites that purport to help them figure out if their passwords have been compromised or not.

The origin of the email addresses and passwords still isn’t known althoughFreedomHacker writes that “many are speculating the email addresses were leaked from another website or a compilation of other websites and not from Google itself.” Other speculation claims that this leaked information occurred thanks to weak passwords or from phishing attacks, just as Apple claimed occurred with iCloud.

At any rate, if you get an email from a friend’s Gmail in the near future that informs you that they’re stuck at an airport overseas and need to have money wired to them as soon as possible, then you can probably thank the Russian hackers who first posted these leaked passwords online.

SOURCE:

FREEDOMHACKER