Image credit – Christiaan Colen
There are many ways to get hacked on the internet, but it seems that one of the more common ways that people are getting their accounts hacked and taken over is through phishing. This is according to a recent study conducted by Google in an attempt to find out the root causes of hijacking and account takeovers experienced by Google users.
This was a study conducted together with the University of California, Berkeley, and it analyzed black markets from March 2016 to March 2017. According to Google, “Our research tracked several black markets that traded third-party password breaches, as well as 25,000 blackhat tools used for phishing and keylogging. In total, these sources helped us identify 788,000 credentials stolen via keyloggers, 12 million credentials stolen via phishing, and 3.3 billion credentials exposed by third-party breaches.”
This study is also in line with a report from earlier this year in which a convincing Google Docs phishing scam was making its rounds. Google is also saying that based on what they found, they have applied that knowledge to their existing protections and security systems to make them better at protecting Google accounts, something that they have done for its G Suite following the Google Docs phishing scam.
Image credit – Christiaan Colen
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