In a recent data breach, what came to be known as the ‘mother of all breaches,’ a whopping 12 terabytes (TB) of data was compromised. This data involved 26 billion records. The records were gathered through sales, breaches, and leaks.

The discovery was made by Bob Dyachenko, a cybersecurity researcher at SecurityDiscovery.com along with the team at Cybernews.com. 

As of right now, researchers believe that this is a combination of various breaches and leaks rather than coming from a single source. Some of the data in this collection are duplicates. They have yet to completely rule out the possibility that any new data will be included.

Given the discovery of the data set, credential-stuffing assaults are anticipated to occur shortly. For those unaware, credential stuffing is the practice of malicious actors using a user's login credentials from one website to try them on another. When a person uses the same password across several websites, these assaults are typically successful.

How to Protect Yourself

One thing that a user can do is check whether they were a part of any leak, not only this one. One can do so by going to Have I Been Pwned or Cybernews’ lookup tool.

The best thing one can do in case they have been compromised or not is to follow these rules from the Tech Talk Commandments:

• Make secure passwords: It is not important to choose any complicated password. Rather, it is preferable to include more characters—uppercase, lowercase, digits, and special characters if allowed.

• Employ a password organizer: The passwords of the users will be safely stored in these. Some allow device syncing. In fact, most, if not all, will assist kids in creating secure passwords.

• Make use of two-factor authentication: While adding another barrier to account login can be inconvenient, it does have an impact. Attackers will not have all they need to obtain access if there is a second authentication method that the user has employed.