Was your account compromised.....?????

While every social media boasts of its user-friendly and data security measures, there have been
many incidents time to time which have raised questions as to 'How safe our data and accounts on Internet really is?’
Very recently a Russian forum ran by few Russian hackers posted around 4.9 million (around 50 lacs) Gmail ID and passwords of which around 60% are claimed to be still working. This happened on Tuesday 9 Sept, 2014 when late in the evening the Russian forum published the data online and claimed to have breached the data from Google via hacking. The publisher, named tvskit, posted the following screenshot of the database, claiming that over 60 percent of the passwords were valid and working. This made the big news for Wednesday as much of the passwords were found to be really valid.

The image of the database as uploaded by the hackers along with the leaked data on the forum.

Google while has clearly stated that the data published is collected from the web heaps and dumps and most of them aren't even valid. However the company also recommended enabling 2-step verification for more security of your Gmail accounts. As per the statement made soon after the leak a Google authority said:

"The security of our user’s information is a top priority for us and there are no evidences that our systems have been compromised. The passwords has been collected from other social site's records     and not more than 2% of them are currently working. We still suggest our user to enable the 2-step      verification for their accounts.”

As per an analysis made later the passwords mostly belonged to those users who used the Gmail ID to register somewhere on web with their Gmail passwords as well.

If you want to check whether or not your account was included in the leak, you can browse isleaked.com and check your email address. However I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing so, as email addresses can always be accumulated for later spamming.

Although by now it is almost clear that not much of the panic is needed as many accounts have likely changed their passwords, and certain entries could be for suspended accounts, duplicates or simply outdated. But still it has re-invoked the need for the security concerns and following the password norms strictly. If you happen to find your password on the list take an extra effort of changing it soon and also make sure you use different passwords for different sites, so that leaking of passwords from such weak sites don't affect you much.

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