Hold Security, which seeks to protect computer users from breaches and even help them to find the stolen data, identified a breach associated with Adobe products in 2013, Target breach later in December, and even 360 million stolen credentials on the black market in 2014. After a long research, Hold Security has recently identified one of the biggest Russian cyber gangs. This gang is named “CyberVor”. One of the main reasons why it is considered “the biggest” is the fact that it has the biggest amount of stolen data.
The research has shown that you might become the victim of this breach if your data can be found on the internet. Even though it seems that all the data can be stolen from the person’s computer directly, the truth is that all the information tends to be stolen from various service providers, your employers, and even relatives. As it can be seen, there are many ways to steal data; thus, there are no guarantees that you will not become the victim of cyber criminals.
The infamous CyberVor gang possesses more than 4.5 billion records, most of which are stolen credentials. It seems that 1.2 billion credentials are completely unique and belong to 0.5 billion email users. In order to understand the scale of this breach, you should consider the fact that CyberVor gang robbed up to 420.000 websites and FTP in the past.
In order to receive data from different kinds of websites, the gang has used botnets (a group of infected PCs controlled by cyber criminals). They have helped them to identify SQL vulnerabilities on various websites. More than 400,000 websites have been identified as having security vulnerabilities; thus, cyber criminals have stolen data from their databases. In addition, they have hacked email addresses and collected personal information (1.2 billion combinations of e-mails and passwords in total). It has to be emphasized that CyberVor gang has attacked various websites; they have not chosen between large or small sites.
As it can be observed from the numbers, CyberVor has stolen a great deal of credentials. Unfortunately, people tend to re-use their passwords; thus, it is even easier to steal them.
In non-techie terms:
In order to reduce the possibility to reveal your personal information to cyber criminals, you should definitely change your passwords and create stronger ones as soon as possible. Keep in mind that hackers might steal your personal information regardless of your email provider; thus, you should be very cautious.