Four questions on file distribution with billions of passwords

Billions of passwords in nature. Wednesday February 5, Special Site PGR (Link in English) One announced “User Data Collection” Uploaded. It may depend on the site “Largest collection of hacked user credentials published online”. This includes access to the professional social networking LinkedIn or Netflix video site. Here are four questions that arise before this information.

What happened ?

According to PGR, the leak involved more than 3.2 billion email and password pairs. They are attached to the file “comb” “Collection of Multiple Violations”, Or “Collection of Numerous Data Leaks”. So this is not the result of a new hack, on the contrary “Link to current data stolen in previous leaks by companies such as Netflix and LinkedIn”, Describes the site.

What are the possible consequences?

The number of passwords revealed is impressive, but the leak will undoubtedly have a lesser impact than that. “This is very common in the community. In special forums, hackers post messages claiming to have a certain number of identifiers. In fact, they are often fraudulent., Explains an Internet security researcher Europe 1.

So most of this data is out of date and the passwords in the file are not up to date. However, hackers may try to use the credentials in this file to access other accounts, for example, by testing the credentials found during a Netflix leak on sites such as Gmail, Facebook or Amazon.

How do I know if my login details are included?

The Cyber ​​News site has set up a search engine to identify leaked identifiers. There are currently 15,212,645,925 dangerous accounts and 2,563,218,607 email addresses. You just have to go On this page (In English) Type your email address to see if your credentials were exposed during the hack.

What to do now?

Regardless of the search engine response, Cyber ​​News invites all of its readers to change their password habits online. The site lists two tips: using a password manager, which creates complex combinations and remembers them, and uses two-factor authentication, which verifies the user’s identity in pairs. In different ways, with additional SMS or email.

If these methods seem too complicated to implement, consider adding special characters, capitals, and numbers to your passwords and changing them regularly without using a code for all your online accounts.