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Twelve terabytes of data and a staggering 26 billion records comprise the historic data leak from sites like X and Linkedin.
Data researcher Bob Dyachenko worked alongside Cybernews.com to uncover the ‘mother of all breaches’ (MOAB).
The breach is a compilation of existing breaches that have been gathered together on what the researchers are saying is an “unsecured site.” While duplicates are highly likely, the leaked data contains far more information than just credentials – most of the exposed data is sensitive and, therefore, valuable for bad actors.
Mother of all breaches
X was reported to have 281 million breaches, Linked in 251 million, and Deezer 258 million recorded leaks.
China’s messaging app QQ from tech giant Tencent was the most heavily affected with 1.5 billion records exposed, followed by another Chinese app Weibo.
Government departments were also included in the cyber-attack from the United States, Germany, Brazil and the Philippines.
How to keep your data safe online
It is good practice to constantly change passwords and ensure that there is a variation to individual logins for each site.
However, people tend to use the same passwords across multiple platforms, which could lead to a user having multiple accounts being compromised.
The researchers at Cybernews commented, “If users use the same passwords for their Netflix account as they do for their Gmail account, attackers can use this to pivot towards other, more sensitive accounts. Apart from that, users whose data has been included in supermassive MOAB may become victims of spear-phishing attacks or receive high levels of spam emails.”
Cybersecurity has become an important topic for many government institutions and major U.S. companies.
Last month saw the largest cyber-attack of the Russia-Ukraine war which crippled the largest telecoms company Kyivstar and the biggest bank in the country. The attack brought cellular blackout to millions across the war-stricken country, showing the devastating effects that digital warfare and cybercrime can bring on a national scale.
In related U.S. news, the Biden Administration has announced cybersecurity requirements for hospitals in light of stricter overall governance on data security.
The new requirements include the implementation of multi-factor authentication and the establishment of a program to promptly address software vulnerabilities.
The roles in this profession are becoming a more frequent part of the recruitment ads we see each day to mitigate the dangers that institutions face with online data security concerns.
Image credit: Unsplash.
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