As the company behind the world’s most used search engine, the world’s most used mobile operating system and dozens of other popular services including YouTube and Google Plus, Google have an awful lot of account details on their hands.
Plenty of us use Google accounts to sync password data across our devices and many more have Google accounts just because interacting with YouTube (such as if you want to like or comment on a video) deems it necessary. That’s exactly why it’s so troubling that the data of 5 million accounts has been posted online in a massive leak.
Leaked on the Bitcoin Security board forum by a user named tvskit, the data in the document pertains to approximately 4.93 million users. tvskit claims that 60% of the passwords in the file are valid, with several users stepping forward to say that they found their account data in the leaked and those users surely aren’t alone as the accounts give access to Gmail and Google Plus accounts as well as many other services.
It’s also important to mention that while admins on the forum have since purged the passwords from the file, there’s every chance that this part of the data was vacuumed up and noted down before they managed to get rid of it.
Given the scope and the breadth of Google’s popularity it would be easy to dismiss the leak and think that it doesn’t necessarily to pertain to the majority of us and some aspects, that’s right. 5 million is just a drop of water in Google’s ocean, after all. But, the reveal comes off the back of other Google security issues like the Android Adobe Flash flaw that not just rendered our phones indefensible against hackers but it also affected the majority of Android handsets too, so this security snowball could mean that Google have a service wide problem.
What is promising is that Google Russia are already investigating the leak. Whether it’s to save face or to get to the root of the problem (likely a bit of both) fast action on their part is vital and they’ve also issued a warning to users in the meantime suggesting that people use strong passwords and two-step logins.
Furthermore, Google also aren’t alone so despite their aforementioned security discrepancies, this may not necessarily be their fault. Other Russian sites Yandex and Mail.ru suffered similar leaks recently, with almost 6 million accounts being compromised between them and they claim that the data leaks are a result of years of phishing (users being tricked into handing their passwords over) rather than something as concerning as a hacked-into server.
Yandex and Mail.ru also say that the data leaked from their sites pertained to obsolete or suspended accounts so although it’s unclear if that’s the case with the leaked Google accounts, we’ll know more as Google Russia’s investigation concludes.
Source: Info Wars
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