The great data leak of Poles. Criminals will stand “at the gate of sesame”. This is what you must do to protect yourself

Leak of logins and passwords in our country. One of the groups in the Tor network was hit with a huge file containing about 4.5 million records with confidential data of Internet users – including login data for Facebook, Allegro, gov.pl, Onet and WP e-mail accounts, x-kom and Morele stores as well as mBank and ING banks. The passwords – as indicated by trustedwarestrona.pl – were most likely stolen by malware from web browsers, in whose memory users save them for ease of use.

What do cybercriminals use stolen passwords for? ‘The implications will be wide-ranging’

Experts have no doubt that the leak will reverberate widely for a long time. But for what specific purposes can the stolen data be used? As Aleksander Kostuch from Stormshield, a European manufacturer of IT security solutions, points out, primarily for his further activity – including to phishing attacks aimed at further theft of sensitive data and money.

The implications of this leak will be wide-ranging. Stolen data puts criminals who come into their possession at the gate of sesame, and they only have to take one step to enter it. This step will be, for example, scam or phising activities to further extort data and steal money

Kostuch says. However, as he points out, this will be a problem not only for individual Internet users, but also for websites or online stores whose accounts have leaked passwords. He also notes that such a large incident can undermine customer confidence.

In fact, the problem is not limited to individuals whose data has been stolen, leaving them vulnerable to sophisticated fraud attempts. The scale of the incident may undermine trust in e.g. online stores, which are quite an important element of the Polish economy. We must keep this in mind when analyzing the problem and its consequences

– comments an engineer from Stormshield.

What to do if your password has been leaked online?

On Wednesday, the government launched a special To check it, we can also use the well-known search engine “”. What if it turns out that the login details associated with a given email address have actually been leaked? First of all, you should change passwords for accounts that have been exposed and similar or identical passwords for all other accounts we use, even if they are not on the list. When creating a new password, it is worth betting on a strong combination of letters, numbers and special characters. We have written about what a good password should look like on Next.gazeta.pl

As the cybersecurity expert, Paweł Jurek from DAGMA IT Security, explains, it is extremely important to follow four simple steps to avoid losing your account in the future. The first is to use complex passwords that are different for each account. To be able to remember them, you can use a proven password manager, e.g. from Google. In addition, it is important to use multi-factor authentication, because it significantly hinders the task of cybercriminals and protects the computer or smartphone, also against physical access. This includes e.g. o blocking the device using e.g. a fingerprint and not granting access to it to third parties.