183 million email addresses hacked – change your passwords

Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt reported the discovery of 183 million hacked email accounts.

The collected data was the result of the work of the Synthient program, designed to track and block the actions of cybercriminals. The discovered database contains email addresses, passwords and information about visited sites. The total number of accounts affected by confirmed leaks exceeded 15.3 billion.

How was this data stolen?

As noted, the information and passwords were obtained using infostylers – malicious programs that are introduced into systems to collect confidential user data. After infecting the device, the data goes directly to hackers, who use them for phishing attacks, fraudulent schemes or further resale on specialized platforms.

Sometimes such incidents lead to the emergence of large-scale databases of millions of users. At the same time, many victims do not even suspect that their accounts have been compromised until they encounter unauthorized access attempts or other consequences of cyberattacks.

How to check your email

You can check whether personal data has been compromised on the website Have I Been Pwned. To do this, just enter your email address and get information about whether it appeared in known leaks. The service also allows you to find out what data may have fallen into the wrong hands. If the site reports about the evil, experts advise immediately changing passwords and enabling two-factor authentication.

According to a government study conducted in the UK, around 90% of universities and more than 43% of companies included in the analysis have experienced at least one hacker attack in the past twelve months.

High-profile cases of hacker attacks

Some countries have also recorded remarkable incidents. In Romania, a prisoner associated with the hacker group Anonymous managed to hack into the prison system of an institution and reduce the prison terms of himself and fifteen other convicts.

In addition, China’s Ministry of State Security recently stated that the US allegedly used a vulnerability in the messengers of an unspecified foreign brand of smartphones to access the credentials of employees of the National Time Service Center (NTSC).

Earlier, the largest data leak regarding China’s Internet censorship system was leaked online. More than 500 gigabytes of source code, technical materials, and internal documentation have become publicly available, detailing the operation of the national firewall — information that has never been published before.