14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that hackers have been exposed a huge amount of leaked data that includes almost 773 million unique email addresses, and more than 21 million unique passwords in what would appear to be the biggest security breach in 2019.
According to Troy Hunt, a security researcher and owner of Have I Been Pwned website, where users can check to see if their emails were compromised or not, this huge collection of email addresses and passwords was posted by hackers on a popular hacking forum and comes from numerous sources. The leaked data includes a total of 772,904,991 unique email addresses and 21,222,975 unique passwords.
"It just looks like a completely random collection of sites purely to maximize the number of credentials available to hackers," Hunt told WIRED. “There’s no obvious patterns, just maximum exposure. [...] These are all plain text passwords. If we take a breach like Dropbox, there may have been 68 million unique email addresses in there, but the passwords were cryptographically hashes making them very difficult to use."
How to check if your email has been compromised
As expected, Troy Hunt uploaded all the data he collected from the hacking forum were hackers dumped the stolen information into his Have I Been Pwned website to allow anyone to check if their email has been compromised or not. So go there immediately and type your email to see if it was exposed in this massive security breach, and if so, be careful what emails you open in the future as you may be the victim of phishing attacks.
As a general security measure, make sure you never use the same password on multiple accounts as hackers have their ways to find email and password combinations when they've got their hands on such a massive collection of email addresses and passwords. Also, check twice the legitimacy of an email before clicking any "passsword recovery" links, especially if you're not expecting to receive them.