Data Breach: Collection #1 Dump Sees 773 Million Email IDs, 21 Million Passwords Leaked: Researcher

In what could be the biggest data breach in recent years, a whopping 773 million unique email IDs and 21 million unique passwords have been leaked, a researcher said on Thursday. The leaked files, however, do not include information such as credit card details. You can see how to check if your email ID or password is part of the data dump, by reading on.

According to Web security researcher Troy Hunt, this data leak is part of the "Collection #1" which is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. To check if your email is part of the dump, visit HaveIBeenPwned.com, and enter your email ID into the dialog box (seen below). To see whether your password is part of the dump, visit the Passwords section of HaveIBeenPwned.com, and enter your password into the dialog box (see further below). The researcher assures users that the passwords you enter into the dialog box are protected, and are not visible to the website itself.

Data breach: How to check if your email is part of Collection #1 data dump, powered by HaveIBeenPwned.com

"It's made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources," Hunt posted on troyhunt.com on the day.

"In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. This is when treating the password as case sensitive but the email address as not case sensitive. 

Data breach: How to check if your password is part of Collection #1 data dump, powered by HaveIBeenPwned.com

"This also includes some junk because hackers being hackers, they don't always neatly format their data dumps into an easily consumable fashion.

"The unique email addresses totalled 772,904,991. This is the headline you're seeing as this is the volume of data that has now been loaded into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP)," Hunt added.

Several people reached out to the Web security expert last week and pointed to a collection of 12,000 files with a total size of 87GB, and nearly 2.7 billion records, hosted on MEGA.

Mega or MEGA is a Cloud storage and file hosting service offered by Mega Limited, an Auckland-based company which offers services primarily through Web-based applications.

Those interested in knowing whether they were affected could head to Hunt's website called "Have I been Pwned", enter their email ID in the dialogue box and find out if they were affected.

Written with inputs from IANS