In one among the biggest data breaches that the world has seen in recent years, 773 million unique email IDs and 21 million unique passwords have been compromised, according to a web security researcher named Troy Hunt. However, it has also been reported that the files that have been leaked do not sensitive information like credit card details. It can also be checked whether or not your email ID or password have been compromised.
Troy has said that the data leak is a part of the ‘Collection #1’, which is a set of 2,692,818,238 rows of email IDS and passwords that have been compromised.
If you wish to check whether your email is a part of the data dump or not, log on to HaveIBeenPwned.com and enter your email ID in the dialog box on the page. And to see if your password is a part of the data dump, go to the Password section of the same website and enter the password into the dialog box on the page. If you are concerned about your privacy, then you should know that the researcher has said that the passwords entered into the dialog box are completely protected and will not be visible to the website.
The researcher wrote on troyhunt.com, “It’s made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources. In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. This is when treating the password as case sensitive but the email address as not case sensitive. This also includes some junk because hackers being hackers, they don’t always neatly format their data dumps into an easily consumable fashion.”
Hunt also added, “The unique email addresses totalled 772,904,991. This is the headline you’re seeing as this is the volume of data that has now been loaded into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP).”
It is worth noticing that a number of people reached out to the security expert last week and informed about a collection of 12,000 files that is 87GB in size. Nearly 2.7 billion records have also been found on MEGA, which is a cloud storage service by Mega Limited.
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