teft of 18,000,000 mail accounts and passwords

[Matthias Apitz]

Hello,

I have here a case which could be off-topic in first moment, but does
not is, I think.

The German Govermental Office about Security in Information informs that
the police got access to a database of 18,000,000 stolen mail accounts
and they will inform on Monday how to inform the owners of the accounts
http://www.bsi.bund.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Presse2014/Medienberichte_zu_Identitaetsdiebstahl_04042014.html
(in German).

What makes me bringing this up here is the question, how the criminals
could get access to this amount of mail accounts and passwords and if we
as FreeBSD users could be targeted by some of the methods. How they
could get access to your (remote) mail account name and password?

What comes to my mind as methods are:

- Installed key loggers on the local system;
- Phishing attacs with faked URLs or with correct URL and DNS attack;
- Using unknown backdoors or bugs in browsers to get the saved password;

Anything else? And how much we (as FreeBSD users) are in risk of this
and what could be done to prevent it.

Thanks

	matthias

-- 
Matthias Apitz               |  /"\   ASCII Ribbon Campaign:
E-mail: guru at unixarea.de     |  \ /   - No HTML/RTF in E-mail
WWW: http://www.unixarea.de/ |   X    - No proprietary attachments
phone: +49-170-4527211       |  / \   - Respect for open standards
                             | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Ribbon_Campaign