Nearly 10 billion passwords online in biggest leak ever

A document called “RockYou2024” has appeared on the Internet containing at least 10 million leaked passwords. Experts advise users who use the same passwords for multiple accounts to change these passwords.

In the news: the site Internet News A document containing a total of 9,948,575,739 unique passwords has been discovered on a well-known hacking forum. The document is named rockyou2024.txt and was posted on July 4. This will be the largest password leak ever.

• Research shows that not all of the leaked passwords are new. This is a mix of data from previous leaks with newly collected passwords. The data is said to come from users all over the world and was obtained via various websites. In total, this would include data from over 4,000 databases.

dangerous

Although the passwords in Such documents They often come from accounts that certain users have not used for a long time, but still pose a lot of risks. Many people use the same password and username for different websites. Using various tools, hackers can use leaked user documents on different sites that contain sensitive and dangerous information. Something similar recently happened with accounts from Ticketmaster and Banco Santander, among others.

• That’s why experts recommend changing passwords for sensitive accounts as soon as possible, especially if these passwords have been used on different websites for a long time.
• With a password manager, you can keep an overview of all your different passwords from different accounts without having to reuse the same ones.
• It is also recommended to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) or two-factor authentication (2FA) if possible. This way, your password is not enough for hackers to access your account.