google got hacked maybe

[corvairbob]

i had to do a restore on my pc because i tired to setup my fingerprint scanner and in doing this i got locked out. anyway today i started reinstalling some programs and all of a sudden i got a popup that said google got hacked and i had to start changing 98 passwords. all of these passwords are to forums type sites or just everyday sited, not banks or anything financial. so i went as did a few then stopped. one site i reset the password to locked me out and didn't even have my email address anymore. so is this true and should i now go and change those pw's or was that a scam? this is what i got on the android.net site. so is this for real? thanks

 

[Hadron]

I've heard nothing about Google suffering a data breach, and would be very suspicious of such messages from a pop-up. The first question you should ask is "which app produced the pop-up?", and if it's not your AV app or something you installed specifically to monitor reports of data breaches I'd be very suspicious.

Now to be clear, the screenshot you show doesn't say it's a Google breach, and as I don't use Chrome at all on any platform I'm not familiar with what messages it might legitimately post. But a browser is the single simplest thing to post fake reports through, and I can see that site isn't using https either. Personally I'd revisit the sites you changed the password for and see whether you can change them again; go directly to the sites, not through a link from a page produced by a pop-up, if the new password doesn't work try the old one, and if you've used either password on other sites be prepared to change those too. Hopefully this is being paranoid, but this sounds very fishy to me.

For what it's worth, the pop-up itself need not mean you were hacked: malicious scripts disguised as ads could do such a thing, and I could easily imagine a script that checked your cookies to produce a list of sites you visit which it could list as "hacked". But if you followed links from such a pop-up I would not assume that what you typed remained private.

 

[corvairbob]

that may be so but doing a search i did find items saying google got hacked. but that popup showed 98 items of sites i visit and in the password area when i clicked to see what password they had it was correct every time. so if it was not google then some site has all my passwords. there was no financial places in those passwords on that popuped. so that is why i asked.

like i said i had to restore my pc because when i tried to install my fingerprint scanner it locked me out of my pc, so i had to use a thumb stick to get back into my pc and then do a restore. so as i was setting up norton security and some added security items, that popup came up and said that due to data breach i needed to reset 98 passwords. that popup had all my passwords in it that i used for forums. i use the chrome browser and they tell me it is as secure as the chromebooks for the internet. so what that pop up showed was telling me a data breach occurred. somewhere at the least. so if that happens then google was warning me. funny thing though i changed a few passwords and everytime that popup show the passwords that i did change, those did not change, so because they did not show in that popup that they were changing i stopped. with only doing like 5 forum sites. that is why i asked here to see if anyone has had that happen yet. plus i just did another complete spybot and norton scan and nothing showed up as strange. thanks

 

[corvairbob]

ok so today i went in and changed my banking passwords. all the rest are just junk passwords. but while in google i went to my security and they told me i had some weak passwords. so that popup must have been from google. so because those are just for forums i'm not changing them. if someone hacks into them i will just create another account, it is far easier to create another account than going into all those forums and changing my passwords. thanks

 

[Hadron]

I can see some stories saying that Google have added a password hacking warning to Chrome (mostly on the sites of news organisations I won't reward with a click, but likely to have the basics broadly correct). So that ups the odds of it being a legitimate message.

I've not found stories of Google themselves being hacked, but many "journalists" (professional or self-described) are capable of mangling facts to the point where Google warning of a hack might be portrayed as Google being hacked. An actual hack of Google themselves would attract enough publicity that I doubt I could have missed it anyway.

 

[corvairbob]

thanks i'm leaning on your idea also. and like i said when i was on my google account i did see that same warning that i got when i was looking at some forums. so like you i'm leaving it alone. the sites that were in that warning are just forums and like i said if i get hacked on them for the most part i do not use them very often so i can just create another account if i get hacked out. i got banned on the android.net site for some reason that i can't figure out as i may have used that site 2 or 3 times, so someone hacked that and scammed them with my info. so i set up another account thare.

thanks