A new, gargantuan data breach has compromised approximately 773 million unique email addresses and approximately 22 million unique passwords.
In a January 17th, 2019 blog post, Australian cyber security expert Troy Hunt dubbed this new breach ‘Collection #1,’ and explained that the collection of emails and passwords were compiled from “many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.”
Hunt explained that he first became aware of Collection #1 when “multiple people” informed him of a large collection of files on the ‘Mega’ cloud file storage platform.
“The collection totalled over 12,000 separate files and more than 87GB of data,” said Hunt, in the same January 17th blog post.
Hunt added that a post on a popular hacker forum provided a directory listed 2,890 of the approximately 12,000 files posted to Mega.
“Whilst there are many legitimate breaches that I recognise in that list, that’s the extent of my verification efforts and it’s entirely possible that some of them refer to services that haven’t actually been involved in a data breach at all,” said Hunt.
Hunt has already loaded the full collection of breached accounts and passwords into his ‘Have I Been Pwned’ website and the ‘Pwned Passwords’ directory, allowing visitors check if their accounts have been included in the Collection #1 breach.
Source: Troy Hunt
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