Hacker gives away millions of email passwords for a few compliments

Passwords aren't just easy for hackers to get, they're also free. I'm Bridget Carey. This is your CNET update. [MUSIC] Hundreds of millions of hacked email usernames and passwords have been leaked online. And it's just being given away for free. A Reuters report showed light on this incredibly large stash of stolen credentials. Discovered by Reuters security researchers. A young Russian hacker was bragging in online forums about how many The email password she collected. Turns out there were about 57 million from Russia's most popular email service, mail.ru, and with that were also 40 million Yahoo credentials, 33 million from Microsoft Hotmail, and about 24 million from Gmail accounts. There are also a number of corporate accounts from banks and manufacturing and retail companies. What's so incredible here? Is the sheer size of the data dump? And how this person, we just give it away to people who paid him compliments. On hacker forums. The hacker originally was selling it for less than a dollar, but researchers got it for free by saying nice things about him online. So, what do you do now with all this? Well, the email providers are going through it to see which of these accounts are still active to warn their users. Hackers do collect this information from tricking people with tactics Like phishing scams. So it's essential for you to protect yourself by not using the same password for your email as you do for other important services. And you also need, and I mean, need, to be using two step authentication. [INAUDIBLE] That's when you login from a new computer. The system sends you a text message to make sure it's really you logging in, and not someone who has a stolen password. In fact, be good to your mom this mother's day, and make sure she's set up with two step authentication on her accounts. It's better than flowers but let's move on to some more rosey news shall we? Twitter's periscope live video streaming app is now letting you save your broadcast to be viewed beyond 24 hours. When Facebook rolled out its live video broadcast tool it made it so videos don't disappear. And now ParaScope wants to do the same to stay competitive. All you have to do is use the #save in your broadcast title. You can still delete it later if you want. The feature could be buggie because it's still in beta test, but it means that ParaScope could be a more important news reporting tool If you can save a broadcast, and that's likely on a company's mind is a way to expand. Because Periscope just this week hired it's first editor in chief to help users find the most interesting videos to watch. The new Editor formerly worked at Wired and Cnet. That's all for this tech news round up, you can head to cnet.com for the latest from our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.