It seems that the password details for several million Gmail accounts were leaked online yesterday, so is it time to start panicking?
After a highly publicised iCloud hack, the folks at Google were probably feeling a bit left out, and it seems that someone noticed and decided to leak around 5 million combinations of Gmail addresses and passwords online on Tuesday.
So, what do you need to know, and is it time to close your Gmail, change all your passwords, throw away your phone and stay in the corner with that tin foil hat you made a few weeks ago? Possibly, but that depends. If you use the same password for your Gmail as you do across other websites, then you may need to make a change, even if you haven't been affected as that's not the best security plan anyway.
If you've changed your password recently enough, then you're probably OK, as the passwords seem to be old, and might not belong to the Gmail accounts. Rather they appear to be combinations of passwords and Gmail addresses that were used to register on other websites, so if you use different passwords for different sites, it probably won't affect you.
According to Mashable, the passwords are also quite old, as one of their employees spotted his name on the list, but confirmed he had not used the displayed password for several years. Others on reddit, where the information from the leak was posted, have claimed that the passwords shown next to their emails were never used by them, so there's also the possibility that the hackers have made a few of them up to get kudos online. Furthermore, a Google spokesperson told Mashable that there was "no evidence that our systems have been compromised", so that should help you rest a bit easier.
You can check if your email address has been hit on this website, and it's also not a bad idea to change your password regularly, so if you can't remember the last time you did that, maybe do it to today anyway, just to be sure.
Via Mashable
