Biggest data leak in history exposes 26B records

Twenty-six billion records amounting to 12TB of data, a significant amount of which was compiled from prior data breaches, have been exposed as part of a colossal leak, which has been regarded as the Mother of all Breaches, according to Cybernews. Most of the exposed data, which was found on an open instance likely owned by a threat actor or data broker, was from Chinese instant messaging app Tencent QQ, while Weibo, MySpace, Twitter, and Wattpad also had hundreds of millions leaked credentials and other information, a report by SecurityDiscovery.com owner and researcher Bob Dyachenko and the Cybernews team revealed. Data from government entities in the U.S., Brazil, Turkey, Germany, and the Philippines was also included in the leak. Despite consisting of old records, the leak still presents a significant security risk, said researchers. "If users use the same passwords for their Netflix account as they do for their Gmail account, attackers can use this to pivot towards other, more sensitive accounts. Apart from that, users whose data has been included in supermassive MOAB may become victims of spear-phishing attacks or receive high levels of spam emails," researchers added.