8.4 billion passwords released online: the largest ever leaked data collection

The hacker claims that it concerns a collection of at least 82 billion passwords, but according to CyberNews, the actual number, after deduplication, is ten times lower. These are still 8,459,060,239 passwords that have just been dumped on the Internet.

These are the passwords of more than 7.87 billion people on our planet. The leaked data may contain private credentials for Gmail, Facebook, Apple and many other applications. Although it is not clear if these are all real login details. But since a lot of people are reusing the same password for different apps, this leak can have serious consequences: from social media profiles to cryptocurrency accounts.

Biggest data breach ever

The group was named “RockYou2021”, in reference to an earlier data breach from 2009, when hackers managed to steal more than 32 million passwords from users of social media apps.

So the current document is 262 times larger than 2009 and is comparable to the so-called Compilation of Multiple Breach (COMB), which represents more than 3.2 billion leaked passwords and the largest data breach ever. COMB is part of the RockYou2021 compilation, which has been compiled over several years.

In principle, RockYou2021 can contain almost twice as many passwords for the entire population of the world on the Internet, because in total there are about 4.7 billion people on the Internet on our planet. This means that users should immediately check if their data has also been leaked. You can visit the famous website for this purpose Were you Pwned?

CyberNews also downloads all the leaked data from RockYou2021 itself and makes available two sites, where you can check if your accounts have been hacked: Personal Data Leak Checker (Personal Data Leak Checker) and Leaked Password Checker (leaked password checker). Charging takes a while, so you may need to check again after the “negative test”.

Other tips include:

1. Use a password manager like Bitwarden or LastPass.
2. Make sure you have a unique password for each website and app.
3. Take advantage of the two-step verification process, where after logging in with your username and password you have to prove on your smartphone that it is you. All major services offer this option.