San Francisco - Google has been investigating different ways hackers are stealing personal information over Google Accounts Google researchers identified 788,000 potential victims of keylogging and 12.4 million potential victims of phishing. Google says on average, the phishing tools they studied collect 234,887 potential valid login credentials, and key logging tools collected 14,879 credentials, each week. It also uncovered billions of usernames and passwords indirectly exposed in third-party breaches.
All of the data has been collected between March 2016 and March 2017, Google publishing the information on Thursday. Google said it is the first study taking a long term and comprehensive look at how criminals steal your data, and what tools are most popular. The most popular method of stealing information is phishing, which is posting as a trustworthy person or entity to trick you into giving up your information. These are the emails you get asking for bank account information, or more recently, the Facebook friend requests from fake accounts of your real friends. Because passwords are often not enough to access online accounts, cyber criminals are trying to collect other data, too. Researchers found that some phishers try and siphon location, phone numbers, or other sensitive data while stealing login credentials. Keylogging, which is recording what you type on your computer, is another popular way of stealing your information. Even with no hacking experience, someone can find these tools on criminal hacker forums. Data breaches, such as the recent Equifax hack, are the most common ways hackers can get your data. In one year, researchers found 1.9 billion usernames and passwords exposed by breaches. The company continued to study this through September 2017 and found a total of 3.3 billion credentials. Google has some precautions already set in place to protect your information, but they are implementing more safety measures after receiving this data. Google can automatically recognize when you're logging in from somewhere unusual. If the company sees you attempting to login from another country when you usually login in from Texas, Google will ask to verify if it's you. As a result of the data, Google has tightened the location radius around what it considers to be usual login areas. Google has also implemented additional layers of email security on its official Gmail app. The company said that applying the research insights to its security protections prevented 67 million Google accounts from being abused. Last month, the company launched a handful of tools for people to further protect themselves, including a personalized account security checkup, new phishing warnings, and the Advanced Protection Program for Google's most at-risk users. Sources: www.click2houston.com/tech/google-says-hackers-steal-almost-250000-logins-each-week
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