Another data hack, over 560 million passwords dumped online

When the whole world is already reeling under the WannaCry ransomware attacks with the bug running wild across global computers, it has now been revealed that a new database containing passwords has been dumped online — all 560 million of them.

Being dubbed as the “mother of all leaks” by folks over at the security research center MacKeeper, the database contains more than 560 million passwords. After running the set against Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned platform, it has now also been discovered that over 243 million unique emails were also in the database, almost every single one appearing in other breaches.

According to a report in MacKeeper, this seems to be just another giant database containing passwords collected from a variety of sources, including previous data breaches. It's what could be known as a "combo list" since it mixes information from multiple sources.

"During our research we were surprised to see as many as 313 large databases, with size over 1GB, with several terabytes of data, hosted in US, Canada and Australia. The database in question is hosted on a cloud-based IP, and it is unclear who actually owns it. We sent notification email to the hosting provider, but usually it is not the quickest way to shut it down," the researchers explain.

The database has over 75GB in size and contains data structured in readable format. It includes data from at least 10 previous leaks, including LinkedIn, Dropbox, MySpace, Neopets, RiverCityMedia, Tumblr, MySPace and Lastfm, to name a few.