On September 9, late in the evening, information appeared that a database of logins and passwords for Gmail mailboxes (Google's email service) had been published on the Internet. In particular, the information was published on the Bitcoin Security forum, which two days earlier reported on a leak of data from the Yandex and Mail.ru email services. This time, we are talking about the appearance in the public domain of a database of 4.9 million Gmail boxes. According to one of the Bitcoin Security users, more than 60% of the emails are active. A Vedomosti correspondent did not find his data in the database. However, a small number of Yandex accounts were found in the Gmail database.

A Google representative told Vedomosti that the company's systems "were not subject to attacks." He noted that Google is constantly developing new levels of security to protect its users' accounts: for example, two-step authentication prevents attackers from accessing your account even if your password is stolen. "We also encrypt the flow of information between our data centers. Our specialists are currently investigating what happened in this case, but in any case, we advise users to choose complex passwords and be sure to use two-step authentication," he said.

McAfee Regional Director for Russia and the CIS, Pavel Eiges, says that "the publication of a database of logins and passwords for Yandex, Mail.ru and Gmail accounts is the result of long-term and targeted work carried out by cybercriminals to steal user credentials." At the same time, "the scale of the data leak and the coincidence of several significant leaks in time are quite significant, even despite the fact that the leak is not a record," he added.

"If we talk about the interests of the attackers, this is primarily data from payment systems, passwords to other accounts and other data of our "electronic identity" - in a word, everything that can bring immediate material benefit," said Eiges. He noted that their goal may also not be an immediate, but a delayed response from a potential victim.

"It would seem that there is nothing simpler than simply changing the password to your mailbox when such a precedent occurs. But instead, the user visits a website where he is asked to check whether his account data is in the publicly available databases, for which he is asked to enter his valid address. I can assume that this will be followed by the real address getting into another database, which can subsequently be used for spam mailings, and users excited by the latest news can later easily fall for the bait of cybercriminals using the phishing method to obtain user account data - and this, in my opinion, is the main danger of the latest security incidents in Gmail, Yandex and Mail.ru," Eiges said.

On September 8, it became known that almost 6 million logins and passwords of two of the largest Russian services, Yandex and Mail.ru, had leaked into the network. Yandex's address database contained data on 1.2 million accounts, while Mail.ru's contained 4.6 million. Both companies stated that hackers had not hacked these services and that a significant portion of the accounts were inactive. They suggested that hackers had most likely infected users' computers with viruses and collected their data over a long period of time.

Nevertheless, Yandex reported that it had decided to forcibly reset passwords for 150,000 mailboxes and suggested that their owners create new passwords. And VKontakte and Odnoklassniki froze some of the accounts that were registered to compromised email addresses.

Passwords to 4.9 million Gmail accounts published online