September 10th saw 5 million Gmail passwords and addresses leaked by who are thought to be Russian hackers.
After a hacker was able to breach the iCloud and expose a picture library worth of nude Hollywood starlets, its hardly unforeseeable that a cybercriminal could infiltrate the Gmail database. Lucky for the victims, Yahoo reports that the passwords are about 3 years old, and thus likely to be outdated.
Many online services dedicated to checking whether your email has been hacked have been updated to include a fact checking function for this latest scam.
According to NBC News, Google claims that the incident did not compromise the Google main server, and was likely done through a series of less sophisticated hacking techniques over a period of time. The corporation also assures users that they “found less than 2% of the username and password combinations might have worked.”
Even though the intrusion has allegedly done a relatively low amount of damage, Google still advises that users change their passwords.