Today I found out that my Reddit account was hijacked yesterday, but I was able to revert it (Reddit sent me a security e-mail to reset my credentials, because someone had changed my account's password and e-mail address... and GMail sent it to the spam folder). This week I also got a notification in the Amazon app (& phone SMS, and e-mail) saying that someone was trying to purchase something using my account, so I guess my Amazon account was also compromised.If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what is also certainly the largest data breach ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed.
According to Vilius Petkauskas at Cybernews, whose researchers have been investigating the leakage since the start of the year, “30 exposed datasets containing from tens of millions to over 3.5 billion records each,” have been discovered. In total, Petkauskas has confirmed, the number of compromised records has now hit 16 billion.
Remarkably, I am told that none of these datasets have been reported as leaked previously, this is all new data. Well, almost none: the 184 million password database I mentioned at the start of the article is the only exception.
Most of that intelligence was structured in the format of a URL, followed by login details and a password.
It looks like haveibeenpwned does not have any info about this latest leak. I'm changing all my passwords now.
By the way, does anyone know where to find this leak? I've got an old YouTube account on my Samsung SmartTV, which I was locked out of because I lost its password (it's logged in the TV, but only the YouTube app can access it, and there's no way to manage the Google account from the YouTube app), and I couldn't find any way to extract the login info from the TV. Would be cool to find its password in such a leak.
