The start of 2019, wasn’t tranquil for the cybersecurity department and brought disturbing news. The security researcher Troy Hunt wrote that someone exhibited a large file of addresses and passwords, compromised by dint of various happenings.
Thus, Collection #1 was the compilation of different addresses and passwords batch, created in the last few years after the leak. Hunt stated that there were about 1.16 billion of unique combinations. The haul comprised 773 million of emails and 21.22 million of secret codes. Many experts agreed with Hunt and called this Collection the greatest ever existed list.
But some time later, hackers updated their haul and uploaded on numerous blog spots. The “Collections #2-5” cracked the record with 2.2 billion of email/password combo. Moreover, the scientists of Hasso Plattner Institute (Potsdam, Germany) analyzed the new data package and elucidated that the total is more prominent – a 25-billion one. And only 10% were identified as unique ones. The actual database size is 845 GB, and the majority of credential info was breached from different web platforms including Dropbox, Yahoo, LinkedIn and so on.
Even though hackers are always hunting for the users’ data, and these ‘collections’ were compiled not in one day, the scale of the leakage is simply massive. The cybersecurity specialist Chris Rouland who downloaded the base checked the passwords more than dozens of email logins, there were only two that didn’t match at least one password from the haul, while all the rest coincided with the keys that were earlier used for account entering on a particular site.
But at the same time, the research of the Collections #2-5 showed that they fractionally repeat records from the Collection #1, and also include 611 million of individual files. Experts deem that the majority of data was stolen from the modest web spots on the back of hackers’ attacks.
In the light of this story, the cyber-guards offered the support for all users and created service where anyone can check its email/password for the break-in. If the outcome will be positive, it is strongly advised for the account holders to change all keys right off the bat.
