Nearly 5M Gmail usernames, passwords leaked online

Approximately 4.93 million usernames and passwords were reportedly published on a Russian Bitcoin forum on Wednesday, September 10. The leak, however, does not appear to be a massive security breach.

A report from The Next Web says that Google does not believe this to be a security breach, saying that “no evidence that our systems have been compromised, but whenever we become aware that accounts may have been, we take steps to help those users secure their accounts.”

Since it was posted, forum administrators also purged the passwords from the text file made available by forum user tvskit, who claimed some 60% of the passwords still worked.

An update from Lifehacker notes some users on Reddit who also claim that the leak appears to be passwords leaked from other websites and were associated (rather than connected) to Gmail addresses. All of the comments on the Reddit post Lifehacker linked to have been removed as of this writing.

If you use the same password for multiple accounts, now might be a good time to make each of those passwords complex and unique and use Gmail’s two-factor authentication – connecting your accounts to a phone number or backup codes for verification – to maintain the tightest security on your email.