A massive data breach that has sent at least 183 million credentials spiralling around the internet, waiting to fall into someone's hands with malicious intent. This breach, which originally took place in the month of April, has recently come into light.
According to data breach identifying website 'Have I Been Pwned' owner and Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt, "All the major providers have email addresses in there," as per a report of the Daily Mail. Hurt initially brought the data breach incident into the light.
In his detailed blog post, Hunt has explained the breach and talked about the fresh leak of 183 million passwords. The entire size of the file containing the leaked data is around 3.5 terrabytes.
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The Australian cyber security expert told the Daily Mail in an interview that, "They're from everywhere you could imagine, but Gmail always features heavily." This includes other large corporations like Outlook, Yahoo and others.
In his blog post, Hunt has outlined, "Stealer logs are more of a firehose of data that's just constantly spewing personal info all over the place." According to Hunt's blog post, "Stealer Logs logs are the product of infostealers, that is, malware running on infected machines and capturing credentials entered into websites on input. The output of those stealer logs is primarily three things - website address, email address, and password."
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How does it actually work?
Hunt explained that if someone is logging into a website, then the 'Stealer logs' capture the login ID and the password against that website. Which later gets replicated multiple times upon falling into the hands of bad guys through numerous channels and platforms.
This is marked as one of the biggest data breaches till date that has leaked so many credentials out in the open.
