Is your Gmail ID safe after yesterday's leak? How to find out safely? That is what this article is about!
The biggest scare going around from yesterday night (India Time) is the alleged breach or leak of 5 million Gmail usernames and passwords. Or maybe not! Unknown hackers have dumped about 5 Million usernames and alleged passwords in a Russian Bitcoin forum. [https://forum.btcsec.com/index.php?/topic/9426-gmail-meniai-parol/]
At first people claimed that more than 60% of the leaked or breached Gmail passwords were valid, that is alive. But Google quickly responded in their blog denying that this ‘credential dump’ was (not) due to any breach in Gmail or other Google services Security. [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.in/2014/09/cleaning-up-after-password-dumps.html]
Google also clarified that less than 2% of the yesterday’s credential dump were valid username-password combination.
Now this is both right and wrong.
From the day’s read through, it appears to me that (almost all) the usernames are probably valid. It is the passwords which might be outdated (read 'changed') - in more than 98% of the accounts.
What seems to have happened is the security breach is not with Gmail or other Google Services, but with other totally unconnected sites. Let me explain in further in the next post. But first, how do we check whether our email ID is in the compromised list?
To find out, I scoured the internet for reliable sites where you can enter your email ID (*not* the password) and find out whether the email ID is in any breached list. I found 4 sites which are reputed to be reliable, and one about which some doubts have been raised. Here they are:
But what they 'presumably' report is only of the yesterday’s (10 Sept) credential dump. The other 3 sites report that my email ID may have been breached in Feb 2014. As I wrote before, more on that on the next post.
So, if your Gmail ID is on any of those first 4 sites listed above, quickly change the password – with a one which has nothing in common with your old password!
And read my further post on the subject.
The biggest scare going around from yesterday night (India Time) is the alleged breach or leak of 5 million Gmail usernames and passwords. Or maybe not! Unknown hackers have dumped about 5 Million usernames and alleged passwords in a Russian Bitcoin forum. [https://forum.btcsec.com/index.php?/topic/9426-gmail-meniai-parol/]
At first people claimed that more than 60% of the leaked or breached Gmail passwords were valid, that is alive. But Google quickly responded in their blog denying that this ‘credential dump’ was (not) due to any breach in Gmail or other Google services Security. [http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.in/2014/09/cleaning-up-after-password-dumps.html]
Google also clarified that less than 2% of the yesterday’s credential dump were valid username-password combination.
Now this is both right and wrong.
From the day’s read through, it appears to me that (almost all) the usernames are probably valid. It is the passwords which might be outdated (read 'changed') - in more than 98% of the accounts.
What seems to have happened is the security breach is not with Gmail or other Google Services, but with other totally unconnected sites. Let me explain in further in the next post. But first, how do we check whether our email ID is in the compromised list?
To find out, I scoured the internet for reliable sites where you can enter your email ID (*not* the password) and find out whether the email ID is in any breached list. I found 4 sites which are reputed to be reliable, and one about which some doubts have been raised. Here they are:
- https://breachalarm.com/(formerly ‘shouldichangemypassword.com) and my former favourite;
- https://pwnedlist.com/query;
- https://haveibeenpwned.com/ (my current favourite);
- http://securityalert.knowem.com/; and,
- https://isleaked.com/en (doubts raised because the site appears to be only a few days old).
But what they 'presumably' report is only of the yesterday’s (10 Sept) credential dump. The other 3 sites report that my email ID may have been breached in Feb 2014. As I wrote before, more on that on the next post.
So, if your Gmail ID is on any of those first 4 sites listed above, quickly change the password – with a one which has nothing in common with your old password!
And read my further post on the subject.
No comments:
Post a Comment