773 million emails, 21 million passwords were revealed on the Internet, this is the largest personal data leak in history

772.904,991 emails and 21,222,975 user passwords have been shared publicly on the Internet. This is the largest data leak in history by scale and is named "Collection # 1".

Troy Hunt security researcher, site owner Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) was the one who discovered the incident.

Hunt shared on his personal blog that a large file consists of 12,000 separate subsets and 87GB of data has been popularized by MEGA's popular cloud service. Later, this data also appeared on a hack forum. It is worth noting that the passwords in this database have been reverse-encoded.

How are users affected in this massive data leak?

According to Hunt, it is likely that the leaked data in this "Collection # 1" is used to perform authentication information. Hackers can use email and passwords that have leaked to access other users' accounts.

There are nearly 2.7 billion email combos and passwords that appear in "Collection # 1". In addition, more than 140 million emails and 10 million passwords were added to Hunt's HIBP data for the first time. This means that the number of emaiil and password has never been leaked, but now these users will be more targeted.

If your password is leaked, this message will appear.

To find out if your email has been leaked in this case, you can visit the HIBP check website. Or you can also access the link below and manually check whether your password has been revealed. If your password appears in "Collection # 1", change your password immediately.

1. https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

Update:

According to the latest sharing from security expert Brian Krebs, the 87GB data set includes 773 million emails and 21 million user passwords are not new. At the same time, this is only a small part of the huge data set (including email data and passwords) that can be up to 1TB that hackers have stolen.

All of this huge amount of data includes Collection # 1 (87GB), Collection # 2 (526GB), Collection # 3 (37GB), Collection # 4 (178GB), Collection # 5 (42GB) and two other folders with content 126GB amount.

Brian Krebs added that these data are being sold by hackers for $ 45, a cheap price.

According to Krebs security expert, most of this data is outdated. Leaked passwords can be used for any service on the Internet several years ago. When a hacker has a password to access the main email account, it is possible to recover the passwords of many other online services, even bank accounts. This can have serious consequences for users.

This incident continues to warn users not to use the same account and password for different Internet services. In order to avoid possible unfortunate incidents, users should enable two-factor authentication.

1. How to set up two-factor authentication on all social networks
2. Turn on 2-step verification for 2-layer security for Gmail, send the verification code to your phone when signing in
3. Protect your Facebook account with 2-factor authentication

See more:

1. 10 biggest data leaks in the world in 2018
2. Facebook was prosecuted for more than 150 companies accessing users' messages
3. List of 52 Facebook companies sharing user data