The importance of internet safety has been highlighted this week with the discovery of a huge hacking scam. 

Account holders with Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail were affected with thousands of passwords and account details being hacked and published on a specialist website.

In total, over 10,000 email accounts were published.  The details were obtained thanks to a phishing scam.  Microsoft is working hard to help people to “regain control of their accounts”.

Google reacted to the phishing scheme by forcing those people on the affected accounts to reset their passwords.  As further accounts become affected, passwords will be forced to be reset.  But is it too little, too late?

The hackers were clever: they duped account holders to give away personal information to the hackers.  Once they received the relevant information the scammers were easily able to access and make changes to the accounts. 

This could be done in a manner of ways: by changing account details, deleting the account or altering account settings.

https://www.google.com/accounts is the only website address/web address start to use, according to Google.  If your browser pops up with warnings, take heed.