Monday 29th May 2023
In a first-of-its-kind major data breach in 2019, millions of email addresses and passwords have been made public!
As the leading news agencies reports say, around 2 billion email addresses and their respective passwords were spotted on web platforms as open text files, with 773 million of them found unique.
Considered as one of the biggest data breaches in the recent times, the leaked email information was uploaded on a file-sharing website called MEGA, said Australia-based cyber research agency Troy Hunt who spotted this incident.
Hunt titled the leaked data as Collection #1 and informed that they were stored in around 12,000 separate files into a combined size of 87 GB.
“Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totaling 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources,” Hunt said in an official release.
According to Hunt, there are around 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords, considering passwords as ‘case sensitive’ and email address ‘non-case-sensitive’.
In total, there were 772,904,991 unique email addresses (as volume of data dumped on to the site titled ‘Have I Been Pawned (HIBP)’ and 21,222,975 unique passwords.
“There’ll be a significant number of people that’ll land here after receiving a notification from HIBP; about 2.2M people presently use the free notification service and 768k of them are in this breach. Many others, over the years to come, will check their address on the site and land on this blog post when clicking in the breach description for more information,” says Hunt.
What more to come? It’s worth waiting, but need to be on high alert to overcome the challenge!
