Nearly 5 Million Google Passwords Leaked on Russian Bitcoin Site

Although technology is moving ahead with pace in all the possible sectors, user data privacy still remains to be a thing of major concern among the users. And the newest name to be victimized is Google.

As reported, almost 5 million usernames and passwords for Google accounts were uploaded to a Russian online forum by hackers late Tuesday. More precisely, all the essentials were posted in a Russian Bitcoin security forum.

Reports have further suggested that Russian hackers leaked the email IDs and passwords of as many as 4.93 million Google accounts. All the details have been posted on bitcoin forum btcsec.com by a user named Tvskit. On the forum, Tvskit also revealed that approximately 60% of the passwords are still active.

However, in a statement sent to TIME on the issue, Google said it had "no evidence that our systems have been compromised."

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"The security of our users' information is a top priority for us," the statement reads. The company added that whenever it gets an alert on whether accounts may have been compromised, "we take steps to help those users secure their accounts."

Currently, email users are being encouraged to utilize Google's two-step verification when logging into accounts. It is also mandatory that they create strong passwords and keep changing them once every week.

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"Often, these credentials are obtained through a combination of other sources. For instance, if you reuse the same username and password across websites, and one of those websites gets hacked, your credentials could be used to log into the others. Or attackers can use malware or phishing schemes to capture login credentials," Google stated.