Phishing attacks via fake emails pose the greatest threat to people, followed by keyloggers and third-party breaches as account hacking increases globally, a new Google study has revealed.Keystroke logging is a type of surveillance software that once installed on a system, has the capability to record every keystroke made on that system. "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," Google said in a blog post late on Friday.Account takeover, or 'hijacking', is a common problem for users across the web. More than 15 per cent of Internet users have reported experiencing the takeover of an email or social networking account. "While our study focused on Google, these password stealing tactics pose a risk to all account-based online services. In the case of third-party data breaches, 12 per cent of the exposed records included a Gmail address serving as a username and a password," the blog post read.Of those passwords, 7 per cent were valid due to reuse.

Source: Economic Times November 11, 2017 06:45 UTC