Tyler Cross
Published on: January 24, 2024
The largest data breach of all time just happened right under everyone’s noses. Over 26 billion records were found by researchers on an unsecured page in what’s being called the “Mother of All Breaches” (MOAB).
The 12+ terabytes of data were from extremely popular social media websites, like Lindin, Dropbox, and Twitter before it changed its name to X. Tencent was hit the worst, with over 1.5 billion records found. The data was a combination of login credentials and sensitive information given to the website in confidence.
“The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks,” explain researchers from Cybernews.
It was stored in an extremely insecure location.
However, while the story sounds very dramatic, it’s far from being as catastrophic as it seems. None of the data that researchers found was new, rather it appeared to be a massive compilation of previously leaked data from a variety of data breaches.
This means that the culprit behind the website (most likely) wasn’t the one collecting the data.
While that is a great silver lining for the average user, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it seriously. Anyone could have obtained any of the sensitive data you stored on those websites over the last few years. Login credentials, personal information, and even financial information were found.
Due to the amount of data found on the website, it’s highly likely some of yours was included. You can use websites like Haveibeenpwned to run a quick check if your information has been breached.
Take my advice and frequently change your passwords and remember that no website is completely safe from harm. The threat actor behind this is currently unknown, but researchers suspect the culprit is likely someone who works with a large amount of data.
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- Source: https://www.safetydetectives.com/news/26-billion-records-leaked-in-mother-of-all-breaches/
