4.66 million passwords for Mail.ru mailboxes and 1.26 million passwords for Yandex were posted in the public domain on the Internet. It seems that this is the largest leak of mail accounts in the RuNet, and the numbers are not small for the companies themselves. The entire monthly audience of the Mail.ru mail service (the number of unique users who visited it at least once a month) was 43.2 million in July of this year, and Yandex.Mail - 27.8 million.

Both companies assure that their systems have not been hacked: the passwords that ended up on the Internet were stolen from users at different times (for example, with the help of viruses planted on their computers and spying on the keyboard), and now they have simply been collected together. It seems that we are talking mainly about long-abandoned mailboxes: both Mail.ru and Yandex have long and repeatedly recommended their owners to change their passwords, but they received a response in about 15% of cases. And those who actually use these addresses will change their passwords - and the problem has been solved, follows from the statements of Yandex and Mail.ru.

The problem will probably be solved in each individual case, but overall the situation looks increasingly alarming. There have been numerous reports of password hacks, for example in Gmail, but the number of hacked mailboxes was not in the millions. The hackers' victims included officials, military personnel, and political activists from different countries whose correspondence could be of real interest. Accounts in social networks are being hacked more and more often - for example, in December 2013, the American company Trustwave reported that hackers had access to approximately 2 million accounts in Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo! and other large Internet services, where people disclose a lot of information about themselves, publish family photos, etc.

Three obvious conclusions suggest themselves.

The first is quite trivial: you still need to worry about protecting the information you exchange on the Internet. Information security experts never tire of reminding us about multi-factor protection systems - for example, when the password to access a site is sent to the user not by e-mail, but by mobile phone and requires SMS confirmation. Some sites have a virtual keyboard - you type the password by clicking on virtual, not physical keys, which disarms many spyware viruses. And so on. There will be no 100% guarantee against hacking your mailbox, but it will increase confidence.

Second - for important letters it makes sense to create a mailbox on some not very popular resource. The fewer users the mail system has, the less interest in it from intruders. It is clear that if they are interested in your correspondence, they will hack the mailbox, wherever it is located. But God protects those who are careful.

And thirdly, you need to limit yourself in your desire to post as much information about yourself on the Internet as possible. The less information about you that strangers don't necessarily need to know, the less trouble you'll have when your email password is hacked. The likelihood that it will be hacked someday is quite high.

Number of the week: 5,900,000