We’ve come across security hacks time and again. However, the latest breach takes it a whole new level exposing 773 million email addresses and over 21 million unique passwords. Experts believe it’s possibly the largest data breach in history, as more than 87GB of emails addresses and passwords were leaked by hackers.
The breach was first reported by security researcher Troy Hunt, who explains that the hack was a collection of numerous other data breaches, going all the way back to 2008. The trove of leaked data was posted popular hacking forum, Mega, though was shortly taken down. The leaked data was dumped in a folder called #Collection1, which had over 12,000 files with a size of over 87GB.
“Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources,” explained Hunt.
Is it a big deal?
So, how serious is this issue? Hunt suggests it’s pretty big despite the fact that information such as credit card and social security numbers have not been leaked. For one, he says the way in which passwords were dumped in #Collection1. They were all in plain text, compared to other data breaches where passwords were cryptographically hashed, making them very difficult to read. Besides, Hunt found that nearly 140 million email accounts and over 100 million unique passowrds in the breach were new to his new database.
Hunt has also loaded the email addresses and passwords on Have I Been Pwned. It’s a database where you can check whether your email or password was affected by the breach. He further advises users to look into Password Manager to secure all their sensitive information such as passwords and banking info.
“A password manager provides you with a secure vault for all your secrets to be stored in (not just passwords, I store things like credit card and banking info in mine too), and its sole purpose is to focus on keeping them safe and secure”, further added Hunt.
