Saw that reminder that your password is quite old and you must change it. Well, now it's really that time. With the news that as many as 1.2 billion user names and password combinations had been stolen, security experts are urging consumers to be more vigilant online.
A Russian cyber gang injected malicious code into at least 420,000 websites to gather the data. The attack "looks absolutely enormous," said Geoff Webb, senior director of security and strategy at NetIQ, a computer security company based in Houston. "It's yet another example showing that there's lot of work to be done in making the Web-based applications that people use secure."
Hold Security identified 1.2 billion “unique” stolen credentials consisting of both a username and a password. However, the Milwaukee-based security specialist says that the gang amassed a total of 4.5 billion records, stolen from more than 420,000 web and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) sites.
Martinez described the heist as “another alarm going off” for consumers still reeling from high-profile data breaches at the likes of Target and StubHub. Consumers, he added, need to think seriously about password security.
“Refreshing the passwords is critical, not relying on the same passwords across sites is critical,” he said. “At a minimum, the sites that you rank as critical such as your bank, your bills, need unique and distinct passwords.”
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