773mn unique email IDs leaked, claims researcher
New York, Jan 17 (IBNS): A researcher has unveiled that 773 million unique email IDs and 21 million unique passwords have been leaked in recent times.
Web security researcher Troy Hunt on Thursday said the data leak was related to "Collection #1".
He said Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows.
"It's made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources," the researcher wrote on troyhunt website.
"In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords. This is when treating the password as case sensitive but the email address as not case sensitive. This also includes some junk because hackers being hackers, they don't always neatly format their data dumps into an easily consumable fashion," he said.
"The unique email addresses totalled 772,904,991. This is the headline you're seeing as this is the volume of data that has now been loaded into Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). It's after as much clean-up as I could reasonably do and per the previous paragraph, the source data was presented in a variety of different formats and levels of "cleanliness". This number makes it the single largest breach ever to be loaded into HIBP," Hunt said.
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