31 Aug If Your Email Address Is One Of The 71,000,000 On This List, Change Your Password Now

Your email address is incredibly valuable. Yes, even that terribly embarrassing one you made in your early teens. Why? Because your email address is linked to practically every personal bit of information you own. Meaning that, on the black market, your email address is priceless.

The scandal was originally discovered by a Paris-based security expert and blogger, who calls himself Benkow, but was confirmed and brought to wider attention by the ZDnet news site.

If that wasn’t already alarming enough, then you won’t be prepared for this.

A spambot based in the Netherlands has harvested a whopping 711,000,000 email addresses, in what is thought to be one of the largest spam dumps of all time. The email addresses have been used to spread spam and a rather sinister banking malware.

Not only does the extensive list contain email addresses, but passwords too. It has been designed, as part of a large scale operation, that will bypass spam filters and scope out victims for malware attacks. Meaning that spammers can use your email address to send out sinister emails aimed at trapping other users.

In a statement, Benkow said that it was “difficult to know where [the] credentials had come from”, but did suggest that they possibly harvested the stolen information from previous leaks and a Facebook phishing campaign, along with the illegal sales of hacking victims’ details.

Luckily, there is an easy way to check if you are on the list…

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