Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Passwords Leaked Online [Security Breach Affects More Than 20,000 Accounts]

You may have missed it, but yesterday Hotmail faced some serious security breaches and had to warn a fair number of their customers that they are potentially at risk of being defrauded after more than 10,000 accounts have been hacked into. Today, however, the whole thing got even more serious with the likes of Google Mail and Yahoo!Mail being affected, too.

By creating fake websites identical to Hotmail, Gmail and Y!Mail, the hackers have managed to lure more than 20,000 users to enter their username and password in a phishing scam. The whole list, which has been posted anonymously about a week ago on Pastebin.com, is now becoming a serious threat as fraudsters who had access may have stolen personal information such as credit card numbers or SSNs.

“We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were acquired illegally and exposed on a website,” a Microsoft spokesman has added. “Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers. We are working diligently to help customers regain control of their accounts.”

As for Google; “We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail account,” said a Google spokesman in charge with Gmail. “As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.”

If some of the accounts were old or fake, other addresses included Comcast and Earthlink accounts.

A common sense advise for you at the moment is to change your password no matter if you’ve been contacted by Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo. Just to be sure!