A massive database containing 772,904,991 unique email addresses and having more than 21 million unique passwords was recently posted to an online hacking forum. The news is published on Wired.
Troy Hunt first reports about the hack. He is from security site Have I Been Pwned This site lets you check whether your email and passwords have been compromised and which sites your information was leaked from.
The data collection as a whole, called “Collection #1”. Data in Collection #1 wasn’t put up for sale like many data leaks are. It was first hosted on popular cloud hosting site Mega before being taken down, then posted on a public hacking site.
“Collection #1” is among the largest data breaches list in history, second only to Yahoo’s hack that affected around 3 billion users.
How to check if you’ve been affected?
To check whether or not your data was affected in this data breach, just head over to HaveIBeenPwned.com website and enter your email address. Once you hit enter, and if your data was affected, you can scroll down and see whether your data was included in the “Collection #1” leak.
There’s no easy way of finding out what information of yours is in the Collection #1 leak.
What you can do is head over to the “Passwords” tab on the top of the Have I Been Pwned website and type in any passwords you can remember, especially those that you use across different sites. If it’s been “seen,” it’s time to change the password on sites where you use it, and stop using that password altogether.
The site also shows you where you have accounts that have suffered a breach in the past. If you haven’t already changed your password on those sites recently, then you should go ahead and change those passwords.
Or you can go with the password manager like 1Password or LastPass, now is the time to sign up for one. Password managers make it easy to generate strong unique passwords for individual sites and accounts.
