Unfortunately, data breaches are very common incidents today, with email addresses being one of the most exposed data in these cases. In this regard, information security experts, in collaboration with the firm Who Is Hosting This, conducted a study to find the most secure email services, as well as those most exposed to hackers.
One of the most interesting findings of this research has to do with the volume of email addresses exposed among the main providers of these services. For example, it was discovered that 99.8% of AOL.com email addresses have been exposed in some data breach, making it the most insecure email service.
Under this approach, the most secure service is Gmail, which has suffered exposure of only 74% of its total email accounts, as information security experts mentioned. Other platforms with high exposure rate are MSN (95.1%), Hotmail (87.1%) and Yahoo (86.6%).
Of course this is a reflection of security in each company, although another possible explanation is that AOL has been operating for almost two decades longer than Gmail, a determining factor in the difference between the two platforms.
The study also mentions that 79.5% of .com-terminated email addresses (of all companies) have appeared in some data breach; on average, each compromised address is detected in 30 different data breaches. The following in the list are the email addresses .uk (63% of exposed accounts) and .ca (59%).
Information security experts also found that shorter email addresses tend to appear in data breaches more frequently than longer addresses, and the trend seems more defined if it’s male users. Finally, email addresses with job titles are less likely to suffer these incidents than the other addresses.
As a recommendation, specialists from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS) recommend not using a short name in the address, as well as never including simple sequences of numbers (such as 123, 890, among others). Using backup addresses and multi-factor authentication are also good security measures in the event of a data breach.
He is a well-known expert in mobile security and malware analysis. He studied Computer Science at NYU and started working as a cyber security analyst in 2003. He is actively working as an anti-malware expert. He also worked for security companies like Kaspersky Lab. His everyday job includes researching about new malware and cyber security incidents. Also he has deep level of knowledge in mobile security and mobile vulnerabilities.
