Gmail and Yahoo mails are the most commonly used email sites. With millions of accounts being breached in various sites, people may wonder whether it is still safe to access their account or are there other ways to keep their credentials safe.
There had been massive security breaches that were discovered recently, including the one that happened on Yahoo that might have compromised 1 billion account users. In a report by the Huffington Post, millions of hacked information are being traded in an underground market in Russia.
Founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security, Alex Holden stated that 272 million unique IDs were discovered. About 40 million, or 15 percent of the numbers were from Yahoo. Gmail's 9 percent made up the 24 million. The 33 million made up the 12 percent from Microsoft. The remaining percent is from Russia's Mail.ru.
Holden already informed the companies affected and stated that he will give back the recovered data without charges included. In addition, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "Microsoft has security measures in place to detect account compromise and requires additional information to verify the account owner and help them regain sole access."
Meanwhile, Mail.ru spokeswoman Madina Tayupova said: "We are now checking, whether any combinations of usernames/passwords match users' e-mails and are still active." Yahoo and Gmail, however, dealt with lawsuits.
Google agreed that Gmail will be subjected to change due to the endless hacking crimes. The process would involve an advertising block, which will enable the system to remove unnecessary advertising data before the user could access their inbox. With this, the fast as bullet message inbox of Gmail will turn into a slightly slower process to remove the unwanted ads.
This act then turned into a lawsuit under the case name, Matera vs. Google. The case was filed by plaintiffs who don't agree with Google's terms and stated that it violates the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Information Privacy Act. As reported by The Verge, the process would indeed also affect non-Gmail users. Because the system just doesn't scan Gmail users' messages, but also non-Gmail users' messages as well.
Google then settled the case by removing the advertising scan. Still, scanning spams and malware will still occur in the message delivery process.
Google also agreed to pay any cost associated with the case, a $2.2 million attorney fees and a payment of $2,000 to each of the class representatives were made. Yahoo was also subjected to pay lawyers on their ad scanning case but unlike Google, it reached a total of $4 million.
