An archive containing nearly 5 million Gmail addresses and plain text passwords was posted Tuesday on an online forum, but the data is old and likely sourced from multiple data breaches according to one security firm.
A user with the online alias “tvskit” posted the archive file on a Bitcoin security forum called btcsec.com and claimed that over 60 percent of credentials found inside are valid.
“We can’t confirm that it is indeed as much as 60 percent, but a great amount of the leaked data is legitimate,” said Peter Kruse, the chief technology officer of CSIS Security Group, a Danish security company that provides cybercrime intelligence to financial institutions and law enforcement.
CSIS researchers analyzed the data and concluded that it is up to 3 years old based on correlations with past leaks.
“We believe the data doesn’t originate from Google directly,” Kruse said via email. “Instead it’s likely it comes from various sources that have been compromised.”
This means that many of the leaked passwords do not correspond to Gmail or Google accounts, but to accounts on other sites where users have used their Gmail addresses as the user name.
CSIS has confirmation that at least five of the leaked user name and password pairs were never used as log-in credentials for Gmail or Google accounts. This enforces the idea that the data comes from compromises outside Google, though it’s possible that they were all perpetrated by a single individual or group, Kruse said.
“The security of our users is of paramount importance to us,” a Google representative said Wednesday via email. “We have no evidence that our systems have been compromised, but whenever we become aware that an account has been compromised, we take steps to help our users secure their accounts.”
Even if many of the leaked credentials turn out not to be from Google, affected users might still want to change their passwords on websites where they used their Gmail address as the user name. A website called isleaked.com allows users to check if their email address is among those leaked.
Source: Internet
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Google has added 13 languages to Gmail’s interface to now cover 94 percent of the world’s Internet population, the company said Monday.Previously available in 58 languages, the total is now 71, with the addition of Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani (Azeri), Chinese (Hong Kong), French (Canada), Galician, Georgian, Khmer, Lao, Mongolian, Nepali, Sinhala and Zulu, Google said.
The additional language support will roll out Monday in Gmail on the Web and feature-phone browsers, Google said. Users can try them out by adjusting their settings.
Changing Gmail’s display language does not change the language in which people send and receive their messages.
Google worked with linguists to make each language accurate.
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Google’s Gmail app has become the first standalone smartphone app to pass one billion installations on Android devices.
The milestone, announced by Sundar Pichai, Google’s head of Android, was crossed sometime last week; the Google Play Store ranks apps by downloads in different ranges and the Gmail Android app ticked over into the one to five billion bracket.
The figure excludes updates, so there is no double-counting when an update is issued. And the Google Play services app is disqualified from the counting, as it is required as part of the Google Play Store.
The Gmail app is installed by default on all Google Android devices as part of Google’s licensing, which covers most of the Android software-powered tablets, smartphones and other devices available outside China. It is updated automatically when the device connects to the Google Play store.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire range of Android devices and Microsoft’s Nokia X smartphones do not come with Gmail installed as default, nor is it possible to download the Gmail app through their app stores. Nor are there any figures for downloads of the Gmail app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
Several groups of apps, such as Outfit7’s range of Talking Friends apps, have already passed the one billion downloads milestone, but no one individual app has been downloaded 1bn times on its own before. The Angry Birds collection of games broke one billion downloads in 2012.
Gmail’s billion downloads reinforces data on how many Google-powered Android devices have been sold, with Google’s executives saying that more than one billion Android device activations were passed last year.
It also indicates how important Google’s agreements to have its apps installed by default are in fuelling downloads, and encouraging use of its services.
As it stands, manufacturers cannot have access to Google’s Play Store without installing Google’s suite of apps and placing them in a prominent position.
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