Largest Collection Of Breached Data Ever

(The Guardian) The largest collection of breached data ever seen has been discovered comprising of more than 770m email addresses and passwords posted to a popular hacking forum in mid-December. The 87GB data dump was discovered by security researcher Troy Hunt who runs the Have I Been Pwned breach-notification service. Hunt who called the upload Collection #1" said it is probably made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources" rather than representing a single hack of a very large service. Still the work to piece together previous breaches has resulted in a huge collection. In total there are 1160253228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords" Hunt writes and 21222975 unique passwords". While most of the email addresses have appeared in previous breaches discovered being shared amongst hackers like the 360m MySpace accounts hacked in 2008 or the 164m LinkedIn accounts hacked in 2016 the researcher says theres somewhere in the order of 140m email addresses in this breach that HIBP has never seen before."