A recent data breach has exposed 772,904,991 email IDs and 22 million unique passwords in a collection of files uploaded to cloud service MEGA.
This data breach was first discovered by Microsoft’s regional director and researcher Troy Hunt who called it Collection #1. Troy, who runs a website called Have I Been Pwned–a way to check whether your own email or password has been compromised by a breach at any point, said the dump was “set of email addresses and passwords totaling 2,692,818,238 rows”. Also, in total, this adds up to “1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords”.
On the website, Troy writes, “Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totaling up to 2,692,818,238 rows. It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.” This means the breach has been attempted from an aggregation of 2000 leaked databases and does not come from a single source.
In a report by Wired, Hunt revealed that the databases have been stolen from a random collection of sites in order for the hackers to maximize the number of credentials they could get their hand on.
“Whilst I can’t tell you precisely what password was against your own record in the breach, I can tell you if any password you’re interested in has appeared in previous breaches Pwned Passwords has indexed,” Hunt mentioned on his website. He also explained if the password you use appears on the website then it is time to stop using that password.
The collection had over 12,000 files which add up to 87GB of data, said Hunt.
To check if your email is part of the dump, visit HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter your email ID into the space given below. While in order to check if your password has been exposed go to the Password Section of the website and enter your password into the given box. The researcher assures that the password you enter is protected and not visible to the website itself.
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