Recall when the personal data and documents of hundreds of politicians and public figures in Germany were exposed online.
Well fears over security of digital information has heightened after the largest data breach has been discovered yet again.This one exposes the emails and passwords of more than 770 million accounts.
A security researcher found the 87GB dump of data hidden on a hacker forum and says many of them have been previously included in other leaks such as the infamous MySpace and LinkedIn breaches.
Troy Hunt, who runs the Have I Been Pwned breach-notification service, found the leak on cloud-service MEGA and called it ‘Collection #1’.
He said: ‘If you’re in this breach, one or more passwords you’ve previously used are floating around for others to see.’
Users can use the site to see if their email or password has been exposed.
‘In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords,’ Hunt writes.
He also found there to be 21,222,975 unique passwords exposed in the breach.
Although a significant chunk of the information in ‘Collection #1’ is already known to the world, the researcher believes 140 million previously safe email addresses have been leaked.
An alleged dossier of more than 2,000 websites was also found which is believed to be the source of some of the data.