711 Million Email Addresses Exposed

711 Million Email Addresses Exposed: How to Protect Yourself

Typically, your spam folder catches a lot of the malware-infected crud sent by the mischievous ne’er-do-wells from the darker corners of the internet. Unfortunately, a newly discovered attack has targeted more than 711 million email accounts.Fortunately, only some — not all — of the targets’ passwords have been taken.

The Onliner spambot, first discovered by a Paris-based security researcher who goes by the Benkow pseudonym, was confirmed by well-regarded security expert Troy Hunt in an August 30 blog post. Hunt — a Microsoft Regional Director who runs the breach-tracking website Have I Been Pwned — referred to a data dump from Onliner as “a mind-boggling amount of data,” in which he even found his own email address. Continue reading →