We have seen that there have been various data breaches in history. This consists of the data breaches on Facebook, Quora, Spotify, Zomato as well as other platforms. However, we have also seen that there have been leaks where personal information of users has just been dumped online.
Similarly, we have come to know of a massive data breach which affects millions of users around the world. This data breach consists of more than 700 million email IDs and passwords from as many users. This breach was first found out by security researcher and MVP at Microsoft, Troy Hunt
772 million email IDs and passwords outed in the biggest data breach
Talking about this data leak, Troy Hunt found this data from multiple collections uploaded online. This data was uploaded by anonymous hackers on cloud storage service, MEGA. According to Troy Hunt, the data was uploaded in parts.
However, Troy Hunt said that all the “email addresses and passwords totaling 2,692,818,238 rows” were found. He added that not every email ID or password combination is unique. But he found “1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords”
Now, Troy mentioned that one of his email IDs was found on haveibeenpwned.com. As far as haveibeenpwned is concerned, it is a website where you can check if your data has been breached in data leaks. If you enter your email ID on the website and it is pawned then we recommend changing the password on that email at the earliest.
As for the collection of email IDs and passwords, Troy Hunt found 12,000 files uploaded on MEGA which were around 87GB in size. However, all the files have been deleted ever since the data breach has come to light.
Note that even if your email ID is not pawned, you need to check if you are using any of the passwords found in this breach. These passwords are the likeliest ones which will be tried to get into an account by the hackers.
Also, you should definitely change your passwords as soon as possible if they are breached. You should also enable 2FA (2-factor authentication) immediately to secure your accounts.
With 2-factor authentication, you need to enter a code from your mobile number after entering the password. Also, the most secure passwords in the world are the ones that are generated randomly. This is because they are hard to remember and don’t have any of your personal information inside them.
