77.3 crore emails, passwords have been leaked online

The Equifax breach in the US was one of the largest and most damaging in recent history, exposing the banking and personal details of millions of users. This latest one is worse, with 772,904,991 unique email addresses and over 21 million unique passwords exposed, all at once.

The data was first uncovered by security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the website Have I Been Pwned. It’s a database of past breaches, setup in such a way that you can’t scroll through, but you can search for any of your accounts that have been leaked. If it’s on there, you should be changing your password.

Hunt’s latest discovery, currently entitled ‘Collection #1’, is the single largest breach on his site by a huge margin. He says he found it all recently on a popular hacking forum, where it had been uploaded to the cloud storage service MEGA, where it sat in a folder by under the name it’s been given right now.

In fact, the original collection was larger, it was originally closer to 2.7 billion rows of addresses and passwords in more than 12,000 files amassing over 87 GB.

“It just looks like a completely random collection of sites purely to maximize the number of credentials available to hackers,” Hunt told WIRED. “There’s no obvious patterns, just maximum exposure.”

This is certainly one of the widest-ranging breaches to ever become public.