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16 billion hit in ‘one of largest data breaches in history’ — what’s been exposed and how to protect yourself

The stolen data gives cybercriminals 'unprecedented' access

You may like "With over 16 billion login records exposed, cybercriminals now have unprecedented access to personal credentials that can be used for account takeover, identity theft, and highly targeted phishing." The data appears to have been neatly compiled, with URLs, usernames and passwords indexed and presented together, which suggests the information was collected by infostealer malware that has been deployed across the web to harvest from misconfigured or unsecured databases. While this is (to date) seemingly one of the biggest troves of stolen login data discovered, the researchers said the datasets they found remained exposed only for a brief amount of time.

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