Hackers have leaked more than 3.2 billion passwords online as part of the biggest password data breach in history.
These hackers broke into the website servers of the social app RockYou and leaked billions of passwords stored in multiple databases. This attack has been dubbed RockYou2021, which is reminiscent of a similar RockYou data breach back in 2009, but at a much larger scale.
What’s worse is that all these passwords were not even leaked in an encrypted form, but in plain text.
Since only 4.7 billion people use the internet, this means that the RockYou 2021 password breach could contain more than half the passwords of the global population. Hackers can easily take advantage of this by combining 8.4 billion unique password variations with existing breach compilations of email addresses and usernames.
The attackers could then use these leaked credentials to launch an unknowable number of attacks on online accounts.
Therefore, we recommend everyone check whether their passwords were compromised in this leak. You can do so by heading to Have I Been Pwned.
If one or more of your passwords have been compromised, you can easily mitigate the damage by immediately changing the passwords of all your accounts. Password managers also help you create and maintain strong and complex passwords and remember them easily. You can also enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on your accounts for extra security.
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