Detect the largest set of hacked data

The security researcher and regional director of Microsoft, Troy Hunt, who runs the data collection site "Have I Been Pwned," discovered the largest set of hacked data, which contains more than 773 million spam addresses. messaging and 22 million pbadwords published on the hacking forum. Popular in mid-December.

The data file hosted on the MEGA cloud storage service can reach 87 GB, making it the largest penetration of data uploaded to the Hunt Web site.

Hunt, known as "Group 1," posted on his blog the details of the new large-scale infusion of data.

It is likely that existing information was collected through many individual data breaches from thousands of sources, rather than being aggregated via a single penetration to a very large service, such as when 360 million MySpace accounts were hacked in 2008 or 164 million. LinkedIn in 2016

The group contains more than 12,000 separate files, with a total of 2.7 billion email addresses and pbadwords. Although most e-mail addresses have come in previously discovered violations, the researcher indicates 140 million e-mail addresses originating from significant flaws in unreported data or through numerous smaller violations or a combination of both.

This discovery underscores the need for consumers to use pbadword management services, such as 1Pbadword or LastPbad, to obtain random and unique pbadwords for each service used.

Hunt warns that the disclosed data is primarily used for attacks that take advantage of the re-use of pbadwords, explaining that the success of this approach depends on the fact that users reuse the same pbadwords on multiple services.