A new year-long investigation has discovered over 183 million new compromised email accounts – with many also seeing their passwords breached – and Gmail users have been advised as to what they can do to keep their data safe.
Data breaches are unfortunately commonplace in the internet age as any website you give your email address too is vulnerable to hackers if it were to be targeted.
Sometimes you'll find that log in information you entered in over a decade ago can still come and bite you years later, but staying alert to any breaches that do occur and knowing what to do when they happen is the best thing that you can do.
As reported by LADbible, this is definitely the case when it comes to a new significant data breach that has come to light as the result of a year-long investigation, as over 183 million accounts have seen their information be shared or sold online.
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This is all available as part of the HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP) database, which lets you see if your email address has been shared as part of pretty much any significant database in the modern history of the internet.
It's worthwhile giving your email a check on the website anyway to see if you've been hit by any other breaches, but it's especially true right now after the significant amount of data that has just been added to the site as a result of efforts from threat intelligence company Synthient.
Data collected from Synthient's investigation came from a wide range of sources from the internet, with around 3.5 billion terabytes of data – mostly 'stealer logs and credential stuffing lists according to HIBP's owner Troy Hunt – aggregated from forums, Telegram, social media, and even the dark web.
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Thankfully – if you can say that – around 92 percent of the data and accounts shared by Synthient were already identified through previous breaches, but that 8 percent that remained was completely new, equating to around 16.8 million unique email addresses and passwords.
Being one of the largest email platforms it's understandable that Gmail was among the biggest userbases to be hit, so you might want to consider a number of security measures to ensure that your data stays safe — especially as Gmail access can often lead to your entire digital profile becoming compromised.
First and foremost you should always have two-factor authentication enabled whenever possible, as it adds another layer of security that prevents anyone with access to your email and password from breaching.
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One other key measure is to ensure that your passwords are different for every website you visit, which means that if one password gets leaked it only affects the site you use it for, and not every other login.
The troubling reality for when your Gmail password gets leaked, however, is that millions of people rely on Google's own password storage for every website, so if your account there becomes compromised it can technically allow hackers to access everything.
Therefore, another essential measure is to stay on top of any data breaches that occur, which you can do by enabling alerts on HIBP which inform you whenever your email is included in a new database, letting you act as quickly as possible to avoid any action from hackers.