Reportedly, 183 million email accounts and their associated passwords have been exposed in a massive breach. However, it seems the situation has been misunderstood. The confusion began when Have I Been Pwned creator Troy Hunt announced in a blog post that he had added a huge new dataset containing 183 million unique email addresses and passwords, some of which were linked to Gmail.
The dataset didn’t come from a single Gmail hack. Instead, it was compiled from “stealer logs,” which are malware logs that harvest credentials from infected PCs, along with data scraped from the dark web, social media, Tor, and Telegram channels. In other words, Gmail wasn’t breached — but that didn’t stop news outlets from running with the story that it had been.
