Trend Micro has recently released a report that exposes the presence of 25,000 Indian email addresses and passwords on different hacker forums.

The report states that the 25,000 Indian email Ids and passwords is a mix of email Ids and passwords from sites like yahoo, gmail, sify, different webmail addresses and a number of corporate email addresses as well. As per Trend Micro researchers, the nature of the list indicates that the email providers themselves were not hacked, but third party websites on which these users were registered were compromised.
In the case of ChristianSingles and Faithwriters websites, the users had reused their email addresses and passwords across multiple websites and enabled the hackers to compromise the victims’ email accounts, social networking accounts, financial data through eBay and PayPal and even their business extranets.

That’s why Trend Micro suggests that it is ideal for the Internet users to use different passwords for each website that they sign up to. That will help them to limit their risk in the case of any event such as ChristianSingles and Faithwriters website hackings. Trend Micro recommends few simple steps to follow:

     * Internet users should not reuse their usernames and passwords between the different websites that they subscribe to.
     * Where this is not feasible, they should limit their level of reuse.  For example, they should have one password for social networking sites; another for e-commerce websites and a different one for work-related websites.  By doing this they can minimize the damage.
     * It is also a good idea to Google yourself.  Type your email address into Google and see if it appears on any published lists of hacked accounts.  If so, change all of your passwords immediately.
    * Companies should have clear policies for their employees that they must not reuse their work-related passwords on other non-work websites.

Avinder Batra/ITVoir Network