Remember how optimistic we all were that 2019 would be a better year than 2018? Well, so much for that idea. We’re barely three weeks into the new year and it looks like we’ve already been subjected to one of the biggest data leaks on record. Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that he was alerted to massive collection of suspicious files on the file hosting site MEGA. There were apparently about 12,000 different files, which Hunt says have since been removed from the site but are still being circulated on an unnamed hacker forum. What was found in that massive cache of 87GB files? According to the researcher, it contained no less than 2.7 billion records. Once Hunt ran it through some filters and cleaned everything up, he found a whopping 773 million unique email accounts and more than 21 million different passwords.
Hunt is calling this massive email leak “Collection #1,” and its origins are unclear for the time being. Considering the name Collection #1 that the data was given, it’s possible that the email accounts have been collected from a number of different hacks. What is clear is that hundreds of millions of people are potentially exposed, so we’re going to show you exactly how to find out if you are among them.
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How to see if your email was stolen in the massive breach that exposed 773 million accounts originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 17 Jan 2019 at 06:50:54 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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