As you probably already know, today computer attacks against large companies are happening more and more frequently, something that logically is bad for users. And especially this has been grayed out for email accounts, since it is basically the information that we give when registering on some sites, and in many cases losing access to an account results in a serious problem.
Now, apparently, recently there has been a massive attack on the largest email providers, and with this, some 773 million accounts have been discovered, of which around 21 million of them are known to a greater or lesser extent the passwords.
773 million email accounts exposed
On this occasion, as we have learned thanks to Wired, apparently recently there has been a major attack on Internet users, with which nothing more and nothing less than 773 million email accounts in databases would have been filtered that could be nominated as public, some of them even with their passwords, as explained Troy Hunt, IT security expert and Microsoft employee, through his blog:
Let's start with the numbers themselves because that's the headline, then I'll delve into their origin and composition. Collection 1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totaling 2.692.818.238 rows. It is made up of many individual data gaps from literally thousands of different sources.
In total, there are 1.160.253.228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. This also includes some junk because hackers who are hackers do not always format their data dumps in an orderly manner in an easily consumable manner […]
The unique email addresses that have been leaked total 772.904.991 and 21.222.975 are the leaked passwords.
In this case, as you can see, the number of filtered data is enormous, although in favor it can be said that the passwords are encrypted, which can be useful as a protection method on some occasions, especially if the passwords are complicated. However, in the event that your password was one of the most popular, it is quite likely that someone accesses your account.
However, luckily or unfortunately, you will be able to check if your email account or password appears in any file. For it, You can use this website, in which you only have to enter your email address and, automatically, it will tell you if it appears in a list or if it is not, and if you want to make sure, also from here you can check if your password has been leaked or if not.
Be that as it may, it is recommended at all times use strong passwords in these types of services, because it can save you in the future unwanted visits to your account and even spam in part, and as an additional measure, it never hurts to keep two-step authentication active within the email providers that allow it (which should be all).