Hundreds of thousands of user data at risk due to record tens of billions of passwords leak

New York: A hacker named Obamacare leaked more than ten billion passwords in the biggest hacking incident ever, a report said. Earlier also, up to 12 terabytes of data has been leaked from platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Weibo and Tencent. In a recent hacking incident, a hacker named Obamacare leaked ten billion unique passwords in a dataset called RockyU2024 on a popular hacking forum. According to experts, users should be careful as such stolen passwords can lead to many types of fraud.

It is necessary.

The user, Obamacare, has been sharing data online for years, including Simmons & Simmons' employee database, information from the online casino AskGamblers, and data scraped from applications to Rowan College in New Jersey. CyberNews researchers released a third version of the RockU2024 dataset that included many new and old cracked passwords.

The dataset released in 2021 contained about eight billion cracked passwords and personal data, including bank information of many celebrities. A recent release added fifteen billion more passwords to the database. This dataset is built on the basis of another dataset introduced in 2009, which also leaked millions of password information from social media accounts.

Passwords in the dataset can be used to extract information or perform brute force attacks. Extortion attacks allow criminals to access other devices or accounts through cracked passwords. In contrast, in a brute force attack, criminals obtain passwords by using trial and error to obtain information.

According to Cyber ​​News researchers, Roku2024's ten billion strong database of passwords could be used to target various services, cameras, and industrial hardware. By collaborating with other leaked databases in hacker forums and the market, this could lead to large-scale financial fraud, scams, and identity theft.