Hackers sell 272,3 million Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo mail accounts for $0.75

Russian hackers have obtained names and passwords of 272,3 million email accounts, including those of Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, Yahoo and Mail.ru. The latter makes up the majority of the stolen addresses with 57 million entries, according security expert Alex Holden from Hold Security.

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Holden calls the discovery the largest collection of stolen data since the cyber attack on the American bank JP Morgan Chase, the retail chain Target and Adobe end 2014. The collection was found when Holden found a young Russian hacker on a forum that bragged about the data he had stolen. In total he offered a file with 1.17 billion entries.

After all duplicates were deleted, nearly 57 million Mail.ru accounts remained. That is the majority of the 64 million monthly users of the Russian mail service. Also 24 million Gmail accounts, 40 million Yahoo accounts and 33 million Hotmail account were amongst the stolen data.

The data collection was for saleĀ for a mere 50 rubles ($0.75). BecauseĀ Holden has the policy not to pay for stolen data, the eventual deal was that Holden had to like and vote on a social media page. After that, he received a file containing 10GB of data. The data was compiled from multiple breaches. In total Holden received access to 1.17 billion entries that, when duplicates were removed, ended up to be 272,3 million uniques.

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A spokesman from Mail.ru has stated it will inform affected users, Microsoft has called the hack an "unfortunate reality". Google and Yahoo haven't responded yet.

To be sure hackers can no longer access your account(s) it's advised to change passwords.

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