The biggest leak in history. It involves 10 billion passwords

The incident occurred on July 4 of this year. A user with the nickname ObamaCare published a file called rockyou2024.txt on a hacker forum, which contains almost 10 billion passwords. All of them are written in plain text.

The biggest leak in history

Where do passwords come from? Some of them are from previous data leaks from various sites and services. Some are completely new. However, their number is huge and unprecedented.

At its core, the RockYou2024 leak is a compilation of actual passwords used by people around the world. Exposing so many passwords significantly increases the risk of credential stuffing attacks.

– say experts from CyberNews.

Hackers, given that they have so many passwords, may attempt brute force attacks by entering your login details on different sites, hoping that at some point it will work. In this way, they can take over various accounts, e.g. on social media, which they can then use for further attacks.

This isn’t the first leak of this type. In 2021, a file called rockyou2021.txt was published, which contained 8.4 billion passwords, and was the largest leak in history at the time. The latest one, supplemented with more data, breaks the previous record.

What can you do in this situation? First of all, change your passwords. It is also very important to activate two-step verification wherever it is available.