Passwords for 15,000 Hungarian Gmail accounts leaked

15,000 Hungarian Gmail accounts and their passwords were leaked on an Estonian file-sharing website, origo.hu reports. When tested, the accounts and passwords proved correct, although the list contained previous passwords and passwords for different accounts as well. The details were stolen from the database of the Budapest Marathon Organisation (BSI).

The user who discovered the hack was a man whose Spotify account had been compromised. As a precaution for future incidents, he began to investigate how secure his other accounts were and he happened upon his email address on the Estonian website, where hackers were sharing account passwords, as well as tips and tricks on cracking various apps and websites. They were also trading the data; lists containing as many as 1 million account details were mentioned in possible deals.

It was not the Gmail accounts themselves that were hacked; the data was stolen from another website. This presents a serious issue for users who use the same name and password for several websites, since they all automatically become accessible for hackers.

According to origo.hu, users are not using secure passwords. Only 38% of them create strong passwords, and 1 out of 7 people use the same password for all of their accounts. 12% of them do not even attempt to make their passwords more complicated by using capital letters or special characters (@&#). The list on the Estonian website also contained many weak passwords, such as the name of the user, their birthday, or 12345 and the like.