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Alleged leak of more than 5M Gmail accounts

isleaked.com

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Re: Alleged leak of more than 5M Gmail accounts

#31
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. just show me the list and let me do a command+f. I'm not trying to enter my email into their system.

Are you being serious? Next time you search google, would you rather they display 5,000,000 results on one page and you Ctrl+F the response?

Wget and grep would be more likely to be used - but in answer to your question: yes, in a case like this.

Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope math. 5M addresses, with very few longer than 25 characters. Let's say the average is around 17 characters. 17 * 5 * 10^6 = 35 * 10 ^7 = 3.5 * 10^8 bytes, or 350MB. Text generally compresses to 1/8 space with zlib, so the amount to transfer would be about 44MB, at most. Serving the list as xz compressed file could probably cut the size down to below 40MB.

In the age of 100MB youtube videos, that doesn't sound like much to me.

Re: Alleged leak of more than 5M Gmail accounts

#32
Now is a good time to enable two-factor authentication on your accounts. Here is how to do so for some common services:

- Google: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

- Github: https://github.com/settings/security

- AWS: http://aws.amazon.com/mfa/virtual_mfa_applications

- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=security

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/settings/security

- Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/account/security

- Lastpass: http://helpdesk.lastpass.com/security-options/google-authent...

- More: https://twofactorauth.org/

Re: Alleged leak of more than 5M Gmail accounts

#33
post #2

Every time something like this is posted, where there is a site to check if your email address is in some leaked list, I really wish they'd just tell me how to get the list itself. Instead, they ask me to trust that they will not use my email address, and I have to hope that they won't leak it. I generally don't bother, because it's just more security risks.

It could be even more dangerous than you are imagining.

If you check a username, then you would probably also be revealing the IP address range and browser referrer that is normally used to access your account.

Google uses IP address and location to help detect illegal access. So giving away this information could make it easier for your account to be stolen.

Re: Alleged leak of more than 5M Gmail accounts

#35
post #2

Every time something like this is posted, where there is a site to check if your email address is in some leaked list, I really wish they'd just tell me how to get the list itself. Instead, they ask me to trust that they will not use my email address, and I have to hope that they won't leak it. I generally don't bother, because it's just more security risks.

Give me your email, and I'll check for you. I won't do anything, I promise. Joking aside, I downloaded the list and my email is not listed. Phew...
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