Google Study Reveals Biggest Threat To Gmail Accounts, 12 Million Hacked In 2016

Users are always at risk of being targeted by hackers and all kinds of nefarious entities whenever they surf the web. Even just having an email account is dangerous these days and in a recent study conducted by Google, the biggest threat was identified. Apparently, phishing is the biggest danger to watch out for as far as email accounts are concerned.

As the International Business Times reports, the DNC hacking scandal that occurred during the 2016 presidential elections was done with an incredibly simple technique. Basically, DNC chair John Podesta was tricked into giving away his login credentials via a pseudo screen that warned him of potential threats to his account.

Every day, countless examples of people getting victimized by these cybersecurity threats pop up. In order to provide users with more information so that they’ll be better equipped to deal with these risks, Google published the results of a study via blog post regarding the biggest factors contributing to accounts getting taken over.

“With Google accounts as a case-study, we teamed up with the University of California, Berkeley to better understand how hijackers attempt to take over accounts in the wild. From March 2016 to March 2017, we analyzed several black markets to see how hijackers steal passwords and other sensitive data,” the blog post reads.

According to the results of the study, phishing schemes are the biggest threat to email users. During the year that was the time span of the study, over 12 million accounts were stolen using this method. On the other hand, this result was dwarfed significantly by how many accounts were compromised by third-party companies, which added up to a staggering 3.3 billion.

It’s also worth noting that as the security measures used by Google advances, so does the sophistication of the methods that hackers are using to steal data. Other than login credentials, tech-savvy criminals are also targeting IP addresses, phone numbers, and a number of other details connected to the Internet of Things.