183M Gmail Passwords Leaked

(forbes.com)

19 points | by FrostKiwi 12 hours ago

6 comments

  • Semaphor 11 hours ago
    https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-synthient-threat-data/

    Primary article instead of shitty forbes blog spam.

    • jcattle 11 hours ago
      So it is not a breach, but a collection of many sources.

      It is 183 million email (not gmail) addresses in the collection of which 14M haven't been seen before on have i been pwned.

      This hackernews title should be changed. (Currently: 183M Gmail Passwords Leaked)

  • larholm 11 hours ago
    The title of the article makes it clear that these are not 183M Gmail passwords, but that Gmail passwords are a part of the leak.

    "Gmail Passwords Confirmed As Part Of 183 Million Account Data Leak"

    • EForEndeavour 8 hours ago
      By the article's logic, I just exhaled 5 * 10^18 kg of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere.
  • nomilk 11 hours ago
    Some apps reset your password automatically (send you a password reset email) if they detect it has been leaked.

    But email services appear to have a harder problem due to the catch 22 where you can't log in to reach the password reset email if they were to reset your password.

    What do they do?

    • bfkwlfkjf 11 hours ago
      Maybe recovery email. Gmail once in a while asks me to set one up.
    • charcircuit 11 hours ago
      Ignoring the backup email case as the other commentor left. In practice accounts are not immediately compromised so there is enough time to send a reset to the original user.

      You could also do things like having the reset require the user to have a token that was issued before the compromise to prove you were able to authenticate before the leak happened.

  • comrade1234 11 hours ago
    I skimmed the article. I skimmed several of the linked articles. No one says the source of the credentials, other than where people are buying and selling them. Where are google login credentials coming from? Malware I assume and nothing to do with a problem at google?
  • bfkwlfkjf 11 hours ago
    Uh oh. For a long time I've been giving myself the excuse that the only reason why I keep using Gmail is security - Google has never had these kind of breaches.

    The argument is no longer valid, time to move off Gmail.

    • jsnell 11 hours ago
      There was no breach, which is clear from the first sentence of the article.
      • Moru 11 hours ago
        If I understood the follow up blogpost right, it states that there is a lot of email adresses where the only hit is the email domain so they are filtering away that as false positives. Not all stolen credentials are properly aligned and encoded with ; on the correct place I guess :-)

        There might be a lot less gmail adresses showing up as pwned now.

  • blitzar 11 hours ago
    sex, love, secret, and god

    Those are mine