GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - 3.2 billion unique pairs of emails and passwords, have been found in the COMB database. And if your email appears in the data base, it means accounts with *that email as a username' could be compromised.
Chief Information Security Officer at Calvin University, Adam Vedra says this COMB database is not new, its a combination from several breaches.
"Its important that everybody raise their awareness about the cyber threats that are out there," Vedra says. "And as there is greater awareness we're all able to as a community protect ourselves."
Associate Professor, School of Computing and Information Systems at GVSU Vijay Bhuse calculates that 200 million Gmail addresses and 450 million Yahoo email addresses in the COMB database. But he says email accounts themselves were not hacked.
"Gmail was never hacked but if you use your Gmail address for some other account it would be in the database," Bhuse says.
He says people using the same password for multiple accounts are most vulnerable, and says they should be paying close attention to the activity on those accounts.
To search for an email on the COMB data base, click here to go to the CyberNews website. Experts agree that the CyberNews website is a trusted and secure website to search for personal data.
And to keep your accounts and personal data safe, experts recommend the following:
-Change your passwords often.
-Use unique passwords for every account.
-And add multi-factor authentication on your more sensitive accounts.
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