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5 Million Gmail Account Details Leaked - What You Should Do

September 11, 2024         By: Kevin Xu

Around 5 million Gmail accounts and passwords were leaked on a Russian bitcoin security site’s forums.

A poster on btsec.com dumped a database of Gmail accounts and passwords, leading many to believe that Gmail itself had been hacked.

These accounts originated from English, Russian, and Spanish users.

Don’t freak out – at least not too much. Google assures that if has not detected any vulnerabilities or breaches in its security.

There’s also evidence that these Gmail accounts came from other sources, such as websites that users sign-in with or have registered with their Gmail accounts.

The most alarming issue however, is that some news outlets have prompted readers to visit IsLeaked.com (which we won’t link for the next reason).

James Watt, in his online blog, dug up evidence that IsLeaked.com, which references the Gmail dump to check if your Gmail account details have been leaked, was first registered two days before the posting on btsec.com.

This means that there is a strong connection between the posters and the website registrants, and could signal that the site itself is another tool for hackers to gain new Gmail accounts for spam and phishing.

Don’t visit that site.

If you’d like to check if your account has been compromised, Watt suggests using this instead: http://nullprogram.com/gmail-bloom-filter/

Regardless, your best course of action is to change your account passwords periodically, don’t reuse passwords for multiple sites, and do use a combination of numbers, cases, and symbols, to make things more difficult for hackers.