Expert reveals how to prevent security breaches as 183 million Gmail users have passwords stolen

People might be finding themselves wondering how to secure their online accounts, and a security expert has shared his one key piece of advice.

In this day and age, we all have numerous online accounts. From emails and social media pages to online shopping sites and all sorts of apps on our phones, it's likely you'll have more accounts than you even realise, or remember.

Typically, you'll be aware that there's been a data breach of one of your accounts and will receive an email or notification on your phone informing you, but it can sometimes take a while for the leak to be discovered.

This was the case with a breach that occurred in April of this year, which resulted in the staggering theft of 183,000,000 passwords.

A huge data breach occurred in April (Getty Stock Image)

What happened in April?

The incident has now been brought to people's attention via Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), a website that tracks data breaches and alerts users.

Troy Hunt, an Australian cyber expert, runs the site.

In a report added to the site on October 21, HIBP told users: "The data contained 183M unique email addresses alongside the websites they were entered into and the passwords used.

"After normalising and deduplicating the data, 183 million unique email addresses remained, each linked to the website where the credentials were captured, and the password used. This dataset is now searchable in HIBP by email address, password, domain, and the site on which the credentials were entered."

While many providers were victims of the breach, it has now been revealed that Gmail was heavily affected.

Hunt told Mail Online that 'all the major providers have email addresses in there', adding: "They're from everywhere you could imagine, but Gmail always features heavily."

Gmail's said to have been one of the worst effected providers (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

What has Google said?

In a statement to The Sun, a Google spokesperson said HIBP's report 'covers known infostealer activity that targets many different types of Internet activity'.

They continued: "There is not a new, Gmail-specific attack at play. We protect users from these attacks with layers of defenses, including resetting passwords when we come across credential theft like this."

How can you prevent security breaches?

There's one small thing that a shocking amount of us do, and that's having the same password for everything.

According to DTP Group, over six million people in Britain alone admitted to doing this. Just over 19 per cent of those who took part in a survey said they use a unique password for each of their accounts.

With this in mind, Guy Hawkridge, Head of IT & Security at DTP Group, has urged people to use multiple passwords.

He warned: "Password reuse remains one of the most consistent and preventable drivers of account takeover.

"Our survey shows that a minority of people take the simple step of using unique credentials, that single behaviour change, combined with multifactor authentication and password managers, would reduce a significant portion of credential-stuffing and phishing success."