183m Gmail Passwords Leaked

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

FrostKiwi

21 points

14 comments

forbes.comTechstory

skepticalnegative

Debate

40/100

Data BreachPassword SecurityGmail

Key topics

Data Breach

Password Security

Gmail

A report claims 183M Gmail passwords were leaked, but HN commenters question the validity of the breach and discuss password security best practices.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

37m

Peak period

0-1h

Avg / period

2.8

Comment distribution14 data points

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Based on 14 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 28, 2025 at 4:04 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 28, 2025 at 4:41 AM EDT
37m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
10 comments in 0-1h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 28, 2025 at 10:32 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (14 comments)

Showing 14 comments

larholm

2 months ago

1 reply

The title of the article makes it clear that these are not 183M Gmail passwords, but that Gmail passwords are a part of the leak.

"Gmail Passwords Confirmed As Part Of 183 Million Account Data Leak"

EForEndeavour

2 months ago

By the article's logic, I just exhaled 5 * 10^18 kg of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere.

nomilk

2 months ago

2 replies

Some apps reset your password automatically (send you a password reset email) if they detect it has been leaked.

But email services appear to have a harder problem due to the catch 22 where you can't log in to reach the password reset email if they were to reset your password.

What do they do?

bfkwlfkjf

2 months ago

Maybe recovery email. Gmail once in a while asks me to set one up.

charcircuit

2 months ago

Ignoring the backup email case as the other commentor left. In practice accounts are not immediately compromised so there is enough time to send a reset to the original user.

You could also do things like having the reset require the user to have a token that was issued before the compromise to prove you were able to authenticate before the leak happened.

Semaphor

2 months ago

1 reply

https://www.troyhunt.com/inside-the-synthient-threat-data/

Primary article instead of shitty forbes blog spam.

jcattle

2 months ago

So it is not a breach, but a collection of many sources.

It is 183 million email (not gmail) addresses in the collection of which 14M haven't been seen before on have i been pwned.

This hackernews title should be changed. (Currently: 183M Gmail Passwords Leaked)

bfkwlfkjf

2 months ago

1 reply

Uh oh. For a long time I've been giving myself the excuse that the only reason why I keep using Gmail is security - Google has never had these kind of breaches.

The argument is no longer valid, time to move off Gmail.

jsnell

2 months ago

1 reply

There was no breach, which is clear from the first sentence of the article.

Moru

2 months ago

If I understood the follow up blogpost right, it states that there is a lot of email adresses where the only hit is the email domain so they are filtering away that as false positives. Not all stolen credentials are properly aligned and encoded with ; on the correct place I guess :-)

There might be a lot less gmail adresses showing up as pwned now.

blitzar

2 months ago

1 reply

sex, love, secret, and god

Those are mine

readthenotes1

2 months ago

1 reply

Please be careful when typing in the name of God. It could have devastating consequences.

I hope you're using a site that requires at least 6 (but no more than 10) uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and special characters.

https://archive.org/details/ninebillionnames00clar

IAmBroom

2 months ago

Scott Alexander, that you?

comrade1234

2 months ago

I skimmed the article. I skimmed several of the linked articles. No one says the source of the credentials, other than where people are buying and selling them. Where are google login credentials coming from? Malware I assume and nothing to do with a problem at google?

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ID: 45730210Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 1:23:53 PM

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