This is the reason behind hacking With rising use of internet, security breaches are also common nowadays. There are certain elements behind hacking attacks but Google owner of Gmail has led a year-long research into the hacking of many of the user’s Gmail accounts and the results shows users are more at risk due to phishing than of data breaches.
According to the Google’s study, data breaches are not only dodgy for the users but phishing is a far greater threat to the users.
To perform the study, web crawlers of Google aimed at hacker forums that are available to the general public though several private hacker forums were also evaded by Google in this inquiry.
In addition, the tech giant also directed them to insert sites to search for possible credential leaks.
The whole process of investigation was done in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley.
The result of this inquiry demonstrated pretty successful as the blackhat search came up with 1.9 billion credentials that had been exposed by data breaches.
Due to these breaches users of Adobe, MySpace, Dropbox, LinkedIn and several other dating sites had affected. The study shows majority of the credentials were being traded on private forums.
However, apart from of these massive figures, only 7% of the credentials exposed in these data breaches match the password that is being used by Gmail users.
On the other hand, a quarter of 3.8 million credentials that were open to the elements in phishing attacks do match the existing Google password of Gmail users.
The investigation shows that users who have been exposed to this type of attacks are 400 times more possibly to get their Gmail accounts hijacked than any normal Google user.
Well, it is the courtesy of phishing kits and the type of information they collect that differentiate users.
What are Phishing Kits?
To your information, Phishing Kits are usually uploaded to cooperation websites, as they automatically took into custody email credentials to the hacker’s account. They get prepackaged bogus login pages of famous websites, like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and online banking.
Phishing kits get the equal amount of details that Google uses in its risk judgment when users log in, like your geo location, phone number or some type of secret questions and this is exactly reason that these kits facilitate a higher quantity of account hijacking.
83% of 10,000 phishing kits collect the victims’ geolocation whereas 17% are done through phone numbers.
Fascinatingly, the researchers found that 72 percent of the phishing kits have been using Gmail accounts to send the captured credentials to the attacker while, only 6.8 percent used Yahoo, which is the second most popular service for these phishing-kit operators.
According to research, 234,887 valid credentials were sent using phishing kits, every week.
The study also suggested a solution that is to integrate a two-factor authentication which can certainly reduce the threat of phishing, but also admitted that the simplicity of use is a barrier towards implementation.
