Billions of passwords leaked online from past data breaches
Dubbed RockYou2021, the list as revealed on a hacker forum contains 8.4 billion password entries, says CyberNews.
A list of leaked passwords discovered on a hacker forum may be one of the largest such collections of all time. A 100GB text file leaked by a user on a popular hacker forum contains 8.4 billion passwords, likely gathered from past data breaches, tech news site CyberNews said on Monday.
Based on comments from the user, the passwords in the collection range from 6 to 20 characters with non-ASCII characters and white spaces removed. The user actually claimed that the list has 82 billion passwords.
But CyberNews refuted that claim, saying that its own test found around 10 times fewer entries, putting the figure closer to 8.4 billion. That's still a substantial number, especially considering that there are 4.7 billion active internet users around the world.
The forum user named the collection RockYou2021, which CyberNews said it believes is a reference to the 2009 RockYou data breach in which social game developer RockYou was hit by an attack that exploited a SQL injection flaw. In this incident, the 32 million leaked passwords had been stored in an unencrypted format, making it easy for hackers to obtain them through brute force.
