If you are registered with one of the many services that warn of data breaches once discovered (if you are not registered with any, it will surely be useful to do so), it is likely that you had an email waiting for you.
Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt has announced on his personal blog one of the largest data breaches to date : more than 772 million emails and 21 million unique passwords have been exposed on a hacker forum.
Troy Hunt, from his website Have I Been Pwned , is dedicated to digging up these files when hackers are sending them, hence he has alerted the world about “Collection # 1” , which aims to combine usernames and passwords from thousands of users and gain control of their accounts.
In a blog post, Hunt claimed to have received warnings from the cybersecurity community last week that the massive 87GB folder with 12,000 files was available through the popular MEGA download site.
Although the platform has removed the files, they still exist on a popular hacking forum that remains unnamed. Collection # 1 comprises many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of sources, Hunt said, making it the largest breach ever uploaded to Hunt’s “Have I Been Pwned” website, a service that notifies users whenever massive data breaches occur.
While Hunt cannot verify the accuracy of all the data, he noted that his own personal data was breached.
Hackers can use bots to inject data into a variety of Internet services to fraudulently compromise accounts, in what is known as a credential stuffing attack (since 2018 these attacks have been on the rise).
We highly recommend that you visit the Have I Have Pwned website to see if your data has been compromised. All you have to do is enter your email address and the Hunt service will inform us if you have been affected by this security breach.
One of the biggest data breaches in history
The present attack is the largest since the infamous Yahoo data breach in 2013 that affected nearly three billion accounts. Since this violation is not tied to any site, anyone using a fairly popular Internet service may have been affected.
“If you’re in this gap and aren’t already using a dedicated password manager, the best thing to do right now is to go out there and get one,” advises Hunt. “The success of this approach is based on the fact that people reuse the same passwords across multiple services.”
It is clear that this is one of the problems that makes us more vulnerable: having the same password for everything. Ideally, it should include uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols, and should be at least 12 characters long. And, logically, not using the same password for everything.
To get used to memorizing the passwords, the ideal thing is that we do not make the application, web, etc., remind us of the credentials, but that we have to enter them every time we enter. Thus, by the way, we will train our memory.
Check here if you have been affected
