Although they were considered to be extremely secure, the major free email services were broken by hackers and hundreds of millions of email accounts were compromised, their usernames and passwords being put up for sale on certain websites in Russia .
More than 272.3 million email accounts were hacked, most of them belonging to the giant mail.ru, but among them there are also quite a few accounts of Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, although their number represents a fairly consistent part of the total number of compromised accounts.
Computer research experts claim that this is the biggest theft of confidential information in the last 2 years, and the value of many of these accounts is probably quite high since the hackers are trying to get money from them on the black market.
After sorting the emails and removing the duplicate ones, it was discovered that 57 million of them belong to mail.ru (which has a total of 67 million), and another few tens of millions belong to the 3 big giants mentioned before, so many people have accounts at risk.
The discovery of 272.3 million stolen accounts included a majority of users of Mail.ru, Russia's most popular email service, and smaller fractions of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft email users, said Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security.
Having said that, for now no one knows clearly how many accounts of important companies have been compromised, but the number is large and we will probably find out more details in the period.
