Largest collection of breached data ever seen is found

Store of 770m email addresses and passwords discovered after being posted to a hacking forum

The largest collection of breached data ever seen has been discovered, comprising of more than 770m email addresses and passwords posted to a popular hacking forum in mid-December.

The 87GB data dump was discovered by security researcher Troy Hunt, who runs the Have I Been Pwned breach-notification service. Hunt, who called the upload “Collection #1”, said it is probably “made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources”, rather than representing a single hack of a very large service.

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from Data and computer security | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2RRtQJV
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I got a phishing email that tried to blackmail me – what should I do?

Pauline received a spam message that looked like a sextortion or webcam scam

I got this email today. It says “I hacked your device, because I sent you this message from your account.” It goes on to claim that it has filmed me watching pornography, and demands $698 in bitcoin. Phishing? Pwned? What to do? Pauline

This is generally known either as “webcam blackmail” or “sextortion scam” and the email should have been diverted to your spam folder. Millions – perhaps billions – of similar emails have been sent over the years, but there seems to have been a flood of them over the past few months.

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from Data and computer security | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2QROqp6
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