During mid-January 2019, a major data breach occurred exposing numerous data across worldwide web platforms. This is not the first or at large scale data security breach that has happened. The year 2018 is rich in such undesired events which occurred at major websites where data is paramount to business development and the basis of transactional trust.

On January 16, 2019, the data security researcher Troy Hunt exposed a collection of unique email addresses totaling 773 million a record to this date along with 21,222,975 unique passwords on the most used cloud service, MEGA. The sources of these data seem to originate from different places on the networks and found in more than 12,000 separate files and over 87GB of data. Many sources contribute to creating this assembly of data breach named “Collection #1” which is by far the largest in the data security breach history. The hackers have allegedly put the leaked data for sale in the hackers’ websites which could further endanger the privacy of those who currently own the email addresses and passwords belonging to “Collection #1”. Once the content of the data changes hands, the hackers could continue to exploit them and discover new data such as physical addresses, date of birth, phone numbers. The “Collection #1” does not contain credit card numbers and their details.

The data researcher who discovered this major breach has instituted the platform to find if your email address and password leaked and exist in “Collection #1”. Troy Hunt found his accurate email and his old password exposed in plain text. Our data security specialists at iQWeb can help you verify if your email address(es) and passwords were compromised.

The ethical hackers – the data specialists who have knowledge of hackers’ tactics and continuously work to detect malevolent hackers’ behaviors – have reported that the data of “Collection #1” has been removed for security and privacy purposes.

Since the 773 million email addresses and 22 million passwords data breach seem the biggest data breaches second to the three billion Yahoo accounts compromised in 2013, the data security from iQWeb can help you create strong security access

To protect your online privacy, you can take a few actions such as:

Password contains at least 10 characters including uppercase, lowercase, number, alphanumeric (symbol)
Do NOT share your accounts and passwords with anyone at any time
Create different passwords for each account and do NOT use the same password for all accounts

The above-mentioned measures prove more appropriate as data breaches soar in time and online privacy and security are compromised at an increasingly larger scale. The data security researchers remind us that there are good chances the original collection “Collection 1” could be followed by “Collection” 2,3, etc which means that more data security leaks could appear or they have already arrived under a hidden “cover” and that could be the most undesired situation. The data security specialists at iQWeb provide sound education on data security and can lead you on the journey of increased security and privacy of data for your organization.