In what could be called as the biggest data dump in the online history, more than 773 million email IDs and passwords consuming around 87GB of storage space were reported to have leaked last week.
Titled as “Collection #1” the data dump which is been hosted on Kim Dotcom’s Mega cloud servers consists the disclosure of 772,904,441 email ids along with 21,222,967 passwords.
Troy Hunt, the security researcher and founder of “Have I Been Pwned” was the first individual to discover the data dump on Wednesday and revealed it to the world on Thursday last week via a blog post.
Hunt claims that the info could have been sourced from more than 2k web resources and if you fear privacy, then you can log on to the website of Troy and enter your email address to check in your details.
Those who fear that one or most of their online services password could have been revealed to the world, can just log on to the website https://haveibeenpwned.com/passwords and then see if your privacy has been breached.
Note– Remember, the data on the said link will just be available for reference sake for a limited period of time.
So, what should be done from here on…?
You better change your password of all your online services like Facebook, and Gmail to better stay on the safe side.
To those who are worried about this data dump?
Well, the news is out that the passwords could be 2-3 years old. However, there is no guarantee that the claim made by ‘using have I been pwned’ could be true.
Who stole the email ids and passwords?
The source reporting to Cybersecurity Insiders says that a seller on dark web named ‘Sanixer’ on telegram is selling the data for just as low as $45.
