Surprisingly, 773 million unique email IDs and 21 million unique passwords have been leaked in the first month of 2019 – gaining the title of the biggest data leak in recent years.
Discovered by the Renowned security researcher Troy Hunt who said that multiple people reached out to him last week and pointed to a constellation of 12,000 files with a total size of 87GB, and nearly 2.7 billion records, hosted on MEGA (a cloud storage service). He added further that the files have been removed from the hosting platform but they continue to exist on one popular hacking forum that described the data as “a collection of 2000+ dehashed databases and Combos (combinations of email addresses and passwords) stored by topic.”
By far this is the biggest data leak to emerge after Yahoo’s colossal debacle of 2013 that affected nearly three billion accounts. Luckily, no sensitive information such as credit card details was part of the leaked files.
To check yours, simply go to Hunt’s website and enter your email ID in the dialog box. If your email was affected during the data breach, you will get a message saying, “Good news – no pwnage found.”
On the other hand, if your email address was compromised, it will notify you instantly and advise you to change your password at once.
The site also offers a password search feature to check if the data breaches contained the specific password that you used.
Photo: Towfiqu Photography via Getty Images
Discovered by the Renowned security researcher Troy Hunt who said that multiple people reached out to him last week and pointed to a constellation of 12,000 files with a total size of 87GB, and nearly 2.7 billion records, hosted on MEGA (a cloud storage service). He added further that the files have been removed from the hosting platform but they continue to exist on one popular hacking forum that described the data as “a collection of 2000+ dehashed databases and Combos (combinations of email addresses and passwords) stored by topic.”
By far this is the biggest data leak to emerge after Yahoo’s colossal debacle of 2013 that affected nearly three billion accounts. Luckily, no sensitive information such as credit card details was part of the leaked files.
How to check if your email address was affected
To make it easy for internet users to check if their email ID was part of the data leak, Hunt integrated the complete database on his website "Have I been Pwned."To check yours, simply go to Hunt’s website and enter your email ID in the dialog box. If your email was affected during the data breach, you will get a message saying, “Good news – no pwnage found.”
On the other hand, if your email address was compromised, it will notify you instantly and advise you to change your password at once.
The site also offers a password search feature to check if the data breaches contained the specific password that you used.
Photo: Towfiqu Photography via Getty Images
