Over 30,000 email accounts including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and other web mail services have been compromised by phishing attacks recently. Yesterday Neowin reported that around 10,000 Hotmail accounts were compromised due to phishing attacks, the details of these account usernames and passwords are posted at pastebin.
Today BBC is reporting that not only Hotmail but Gmail, Yahoo Mail accounts details were also posted at Pastebin and the total number of accounts compromised is above 30,000.
If you don’t know, Phishing attackers lure web users to login to fake websites so that the account credentials like username and password are transferred to those scammers. If users tried to login to these fake websites they will be transferred to the scammers. The spam emails we receive often contain messages like update your paypal account details or update your bank login info.
Google forced the affected user accounts to reset their Gmail login passwords according to BBC
“We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts,” said a Google spokesperson.
“As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.”
The firm stressed that the scam was “not a breach of Gmail security” but rather “a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers”.
The best thing to do now is to reset your passwords and not to use the same password for all the web services you use. If you are clicking links in email make sure the site is legitimate and then login to be safe.
Thank you for the information on Phishing scams. I am going to reset my password.