Security researcher Troy Hunt reported a security breach on his blog that involves 772,904,991 email addresses and over 21 million passwords.
The information was posted on MEGA, a cloud service, and subsequently persisted on a hacking forum in the shape of a folder that contained over 12,000 files, which clocked in at 87 gigabytes.
The data has been since removed from MEGA, but there’s no way to tell how many people might have saved and taken advantage of the data while it was still online.
These combinations of e-mails and passwords are easy prey for hackers, especially when using automated processes that can throw them at sites and services and, usually, the people who end up being affected are those who reuse their password across all the services and websites they use.
The good news is that you can find out if your email was in the MEGA folder: Hunt also runs the Have I Been Pwned website and he has loaded all the data in it.
All you have to to is write down your email in the search box to see if you’ve been affected.
If you have been, change your passwords immediately, preferably to something more complicated and never re-use your password on another e-mail, website or app.
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