(Image source from: Is you Gmail password hacked?})

Here is both good and a bad news for anyone with a Gmail account.

The bad news is that hackers have got their hands on nearly 5 million Gmail addresses and passwords and made them all public.

The good part is that even if your Gmail address is hacked, the password might be too old for your concern.

Russian tech blog Habrahabr opines that the leaked Gmail addresses and passwords were most likely obtained through phishing, use of weak passwords and other general compromises, and were not obtained by hacking Google server.

To know if your email security has been compromised, you can go to a site called “Is my email leaked?” and check the status of your Gmail, Yandex, or Mail.ru account.

The site is safe, and you can enter a brief shortened version of your email address with asterisks if you do not wish to risk the security of your email id.

Earlier today Australian security researcher Troy Hunt tweeted that he’d soon be adding the Gmail addresses to his own haveibeenpwned.com compromised-email checking website, which aggregates the results of large password dumps.

Based on an informal poll of the Tom’s Guide New York office, not that many people seem to be affected by this data dump. This makes sense when you consider that Gmail has more than 500 million users and the password breach affects fewer than 1 percent of them.

Even if you’re one of the 5 million affected, you may not have to worry. Many of the passwords on the list are outdated, tweeted Peter Kruse of Danish security firm CSIS — some by as long as three years. If you change your password on even a semi-regular basis (as Gmail recommends), cybercriminals most likely have no way to access your account or personal information.

AW: Suchorita Choudhury