Data security

Giant Data Breach: 773 Million Passwords and Email Addresses

More than 87GB of passwords and email addresses have been leaked and distributed in a folder dubbed “Collection #1” by hackers in a significant data breach. If you’re in this breach, one or more passwords you’ve previously used are floating around for others to see.
Nearly 22 million unique passwords and more than 772 million email addresses was hosted on cloud storage service MEGA. The link to the dump was posted on a hacking forum, but has been since taken down from the service, according to mashable.com.
Troy Hunt, a security researcher, explains the cache of emails and passwords were built up from numerous data breaches from allegedly thousands of sources, dating all the way back to 2008.
In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords, according to troyhunt.com. The unique email addresses totalled 772,904,991. There are 21,222,975 unique passwords.