773 million email addresses exposed in a cyber attack discovered a few hours ago
Yesterday, Thursday 17 January, the computer scientist Troy Hunt announced that he had discovered, on a popular file sharing site, a list of emails and passwords used as registration credentials for numerous sites. Well 773 million, email addresses exposed and 22 million passwords.
Warning, 'exposed' does not necessarily mean violated. Also because it is not known (most likely not, anyway) if the addresses and passwords were jointly stolen, and therefore are matched. It does mean, however, that it is possible that hackers have discovered that your email mariorossi@sito.com was used as a credential for accessing a particular site.
What to do immediately? The first thing to do is to check if your email has been exposed, using this tool. If so, do not despair: immediately change the password of the offending email address, immediately afterwards do a similar check here with the passwords you use most often. Easy verification if, alas, you always use the same password, but more difficult if you use many different passwords. In the latter case, however, fortunately the chances that your passwords have been exposed is greatly reduced.
What to do next? If any of your passwords have been exposed, immediately identify the sites where you use them and change them immediately (if you use Google Chrome you can find your passwords on https://passwords.google.com/ ). If, on the other hand, the exposure concerns only your email, pay close attention to any email alerts regarding 'strange' accesses, or from unknown locations, to your online services.
What to do always? Use different passwords for each service, create passwords that are difficult to crack (here we explain how to do it), change your passwords periodically. Happy surfing!
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