Have you been hacked?

The cyber security company Avast claim that 29,271,842,390 passwords have been stolen recently, mainly from emails accounts. Problem is you don’t know this is going on or where the information is being used. Some of the big attacks run into millions of addresses that are sold on the dark web.

I think we need to assume that nothing is safe so do not put info into emails that’s sensitive. That’s why a lot of documents (PDFs) have a secondary security gateway, same with some websites if you try to access from another device (IP address). Larger companies use ‘firewalls’ to protect their internal mail systems and we’ve even heard of companies going back to paper messages!

Check your email address: www.avast.com/hackcheck

Here’s an example of an attack that took place earlier this year as listed on the Avast website

On January 7, 2019, an online user named Sanixer advertised 5 massive collections of leaked email and password combinations for sale on a popular hacking forum. These collections include a total of 993GB of personal information and seem to be mostly rehashes of previous breaches. The shear size of so much breach data available in one place captured a lot of attention in the mainstream media. The collections were hosted for a short time on the popular hosting service MEGA, and have since been shared via download torrents and private links hundreds of times. Lifetime access to the data was being sold for $45. Collection #2 consists of more than 3 billion unique records across 24,921 individual files.

Here at Oast House Media we use Office365 which offers one of the best security levels available as it’s updated weekly to combat the latest hacking methods.