More than 26 billion records have been exposed in what has been described as the 'Mother of all breaches'.
Bob Dyachenko, cybersecurity researcher together with the Cybernews, discovered the records on an open instance, and included over 280 million records from Twitter, 250 million from LinkedIn, 153 million from Adobe and 143 million from Canva.
The Cybernews team reported that "while the leaked dataset contains mostly information from past data breaches, it almost certainly holds new data, that was not published before. For example, the Cybernews data leak checker, which relies on data from all major data leaks, contains information from over 2,500 data breaches with 15 billion records."
"The Majority of the Population have been Affected"
Mantas Sasnauskas, Cybernews’ head of security research, told the Daily Mail that “probably the majority of the population have been affected.”
This breach could result in a large number of credential stuffing attacks, due to the same passwords being used across different platforms.
“If users use the same passwords for their Netflix account as they do for their Gmail account, attackers can use this to pivot towards other, more sensitive accounts. Apart from that, users whose data has been included in supermassive MOAB may become victims of spear-phishing attacks or receive high levels of spam emails,” said the research team.
How to Keep Accounts More Secure
Cybernews advice, mirrors what we have advised in numerous breaches historically:
- Use strong, hard to guess passwords
- Enable multi-factor authentication on all important accounts
- Keep an eye for phishing and spear phishing attempts
- Check for password duplicates and and immediately set up new protection for accounts that share the same passwords
