Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Google Reports Huge Drop in Hacked Gmail Accounts

In a blog post on the company’s war against scams and spam, Google announced on Tuesday that they’ve worked-up a method that is stopping nearly all of the attacks aimed at Gmail account holders. According to the data, only .3% of the malicious or potentially unwanted messages are hitting inboxes.

In a blog post on the company’s war against scams and spam, Google announced on Tuesday that they’ve worked-up a method that is stopping nearly all of the attacks aimed at Gmail account holders. According to the data, only .3% of the malicious or potentially unwanted messages are hitting inboxes.

For those doing the math, Google’s security measures, including complex risk analysis in addition to more than 120 other variables, have lowered the number of compromised Gmail accounts by 99.7% since the peak of the hijacking attempts in 2011.

The types of attacks and attempts vary, but Google singled out two noteworthy events. In one case, an attacker used stolen passwords in an attempt to access a million different Google accounts daily for weeks. In another example, a gang attempted sign-ins at a rate of more than 100 accounts per second.

“Every day, cyber criminals break into websites to steal databases of usernames and passwords—the online “keys” to accounts. They put the databases up for sale on the black market, or use them for their own nefarious purposes. Because many people re-use the same password across different accounts, stolen passwords from one site are often valid on others,” Google explained in a blog post. 

Over the last few years, Google has introduced several defensive measures for users, including a wide range of account recovery and verification procedures, and two-factor authentication. Some of their protection measures have been headline grabbing events, including warnings to journalists that their Gmail accounts have been potentially accessed by an unauthorized third-party.

“If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner,” wrote Google Security Engineer, Mike Hearn.

In order to maintain a high rate of protection, Google’s blog post urged users to update their security settings, and use all of the available tools.

Written By

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.