On a popular hacking form, a user has leaked a file that contains 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext passwords. The list appears to be a compilation of pa

‘RockYou2024’: Nearly 10 billion passwords leaked online

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2024-07-09 07:30:05

On a popular hacking form, a user has leaked a file that contains 9,948,575,739 unique plaintext passwords. The list appears to be a compilation of passwords that were obtained during several old and more recent data breaches.

To cybercriminals the list has some value because it contains real-world passwords. This means if an attacker tried this list of passwords to try to break into an account (known as a brute force attack) they’s be more likely to get in than just trying a list of any old letters and words. However, it’s highly unlikely that there are any services or websites that would allow anyone to try such an enormous number of passwords, so it’s really only useful to attackers who have stolen a password database and are trying to crack its passwords offline, on their own computer.

Another possible use for cybercriminals is to combine the list with data from other breaches, such as combinations of usernames and passwords, which could get results if the password has been reused. If the cybercriminals also have a list that contains hashed passwords, they could even try to match the hash values of the passwords.