2018 was made up of so many data breaches and various kinds of hacks, and we just got to 2019 and one of the biggest data leaks in recent years has already surfaced online.
The latest data breach has almost 773 million unique email addresses, 21 million unique paaswords, and nearly 2.7 billion records found to be hosted on cloud service MEGA.
According to a blog post by renowned security researcher Troy Hunt, the data which he dubbed "Collection #1" totalled over 12,000 separate files with more than 87GB of data.
Hunt explained that the data in Collection #1 was made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.
"What i can say is that my own personal data is in there and it's accurate; right email address and a password I used many years ago," Hunt wrote. "In short, if you're in this breach, one or more passwords you've previously used are floating around for others to see."
Hunts said that the data contained dehashed (including his own) which have been converted back to plain text.
The security researcher went on to explain that he gained the information after multiple people reached out to him last week with concern over the data on MEGA, and that the Collection #1 dump was a topic of discussion on a hacking forum.
"The post on the forum referenced 'a collection of 2000+ dehashed databases and Combos stored by topic' and provided a directory listing of 2,890 of the files," Hunt wrote in the post.
How to check if you were affected in the data breach
Lucky for you, Hunt's Have I Been Pwned website is focused on scanning for email addresses that have been involved in data breaches is here to help you out.Hunt has integrated the database in his Have I Been Pwned website for people to be able to check if their email address was involved in the breach.
To check if you were involved in the breach, click here to visit Have I Been Pwned, enter your email address in the box and then check.
The result from the scan will show if your email address was involved in the breach or not. However, it it did, waste no time in resetting your password. Talking about passwords, the site also has a password search that scans your password(s) to see if it has been involved in any data breach.
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