26 billion user records exposed

The leak includes data from several previous breaches and contains 12 terabytes of information along with 26 billion user records. It includes user data from LinkedIn and Twitter, among others, and is believed to be the largest leak ever discovered.

It was last week that the database of leaked data was discovered by researcher and owner of securitydiscovery.com Bob Dyachenko along with cybernews.com. According to the team, which is calling it the “mother of all breaches,” the leaked material mostly contains information from previous breaches, but it is very likely that it also contains new data that has not yet been made public.

In addition, the material contains 26 billion user records divided into 3,800 folders, with each folder corresponding to a separate breach. It is believed to be the largest leak ever discovered.

– The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts, the researchers said.

“Cyber hygiene care”

The largest amount of data, 1.4 billion, comes from Tencent QQ, a Chinese instant messaging application. Other sources include MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Adobe, Badoo and China’s Weibo. On cybernews.com, researchers have updated the site to allow users to search for their email address to see if they have been affected.

However, cyber researchers are urging users to be “vigilant and take care of their cyber hygiene”, including using strong, hard-to-guess passwords, enabling multi-factor authentication on all important accounts, and not using the same password on different sites.

Last week, more than 70 million credentials were compromised in phishing attacks, including credentials for PayPal, Netflix and Facebook.