A new scandal about private data leaks has been made public. As has just been discovered, they have come to Steal almost 773 million email addresses and more than 21 million passwords. We tell you what exactly has happened and what you have to do to check if you are also affected.
One of the biggest leaks in history
After the great data theft suffered by Yahoo! in 2017, this can be considered the largest leak of private data to dateto. And it is that an online collection has been leaked that contained 87 GB of stolen data and that had been dumped in the Mega service. Inside were kept nothing more and nothing less than 772.904.991 email addresses and 21.222.975 passwords, of which 1.160.253.228 are direct email-password combinations -yes, we are always talking about figures in millions.
Information has been discovered and made public by Troy Hunt, a well-known cybersecurity researcher who founded one of the most popular portals that exist to check if your private data has been compromised at some point, Have I been pwned?.
Email addresses and passwords have apparently been stored during years, since it can be verified that some of the records date from 2008, says Hunt. The theft also does not come from a single source: there are more than 2.000 source sites from which the information has been obtained, so the chances that you are also affected by this leak are high.
How to check if your email and password are affected
As we say, the chances that your email and password have been exposed and affected by this leak they are quite high, so we are going to indicate the steps to follow so that you can verify it for yourself:
- Go to the web Have I been pwned?.
- Type your email address in the box that appears.
- Click on the “pwned?” button.
- If you get the message "Oh no — pwned!" it means that your data has been compromised.
- A little further down you can see the sites where your information was stolen (Collection #1 will appear and perhaps some other portal that you didn't even know had been hacked).
- If you have several operational email accounts, check each one by entering them one by one in the box as explained in points 2 and 3.
In case you come across such a cake, we recommend that you immediately change the password from your email accounts. The best and safest thing is that you use a password generator app to set a password that is strong and solid.
We also strongly recommend that you use the 2-step authentication in all the services that allow it. Finally, the web suggests that you subscribe to its alarm system with the emails you use, so that if it is compromised again, you will receive a notice.