The 'Biggest EVER' Collection of Hacked Passwords Is Not That Bad

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evegxw/collection-one-data-breach-password-hack-what-to-do

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Motherboard.vice.com
Jan 17 2019

If you casually browse tech news today you may come across some scary stuff:
millions and millions of emails and passwords (perhaps even yours!) have been
dumped online.

Gizmodo called it the "mother of all breaches." Wired said it's a "monster
breach." The Daily Mail went with "Biggest EVER collection of breached data."
Mashable advised readers to change their password—again.

But hold on, do not panic.

If you've followed our work at Motherboard, you know that millions of passwords
get dumped online pretty often. In 2016, for example, we revealed that hackers
were trading 427 million MySpace passwords, and 117 million LinkedIn passwords.

This new breach, which is being called "Collection #1," is actually not that bad
compared to other massive breaches in the past if you carefully read what data
was exposed. According to Troy Hunt, the security researcher who first reported
and analyzed it, this collection of credentials includes 773 million unique
email addresses, and 21 million unique passwords.

[...]

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