773 Million Email Addresses & 2.7 Billion Data Exposed In New Data Breach, Here's How To Check If You Were Affected

 2018 was made up of so many data breaches and various kinds of hacks, and we just got to 2019 and one of the biggest data leaks in recent years has already surfaced online.

The latest data breach has almost 773 million unique email addresses, 21 million unique paaswords, and nearly 2.7 billion records found to be hosted on cloud service MEGA.

According to a blog post by renowned security researcher Troy Hunt, the data which he dubbed "Collection #1" totalled over 12,000 separate files with more than 87GB of data.


Hunt explained that the data in Collection #1 was made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.

"What i can say is that my own personal data is in there and it's accurate; right email address and a password I used many years ago," Hunt wrote. "In short, if you're in this breach, one or more passwords you've previously used are floating around for others to see."

Hunts said that the data contained dehashed (including his own) which have been converted back to plain text.

The security researcher went on to explain that he gained the information after multiple people reached out to him last week with concern over the data on MEGA, and that the Collection #1 dump was a topic of discussion on a hacking forum.

"The post on the lembaga referenced 'a collection of 2000+ dehashed databases and Combos stored by topic' and provided a directory listing of 2,890 of the files," Hunt wrote in the post.

How to check if you were affected in the data breach

Lucky for you, Hunt's Have I Been Pwned website is focused on scanning for email addresses that have been involved in data breaches is here to help you out.

Hunt has integrated the database in his Have I Been Pwned website for people to be able to check if their email address was involved in the breach.


To check if you were involved in the breach, click here to visit Have I Been Pwned, enter your email address in the box and then check.

The result from the scan will show if your email address was involved in the breach or not. However, it it did, waste no time in resetting your password. Talking about passwords, the site also has a password search that scans your password(s) to see if it has been involved in any data breach.

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Google Has Launched Password Checkup To Protect Your Online Accounts & Passwords

Internet giant Google has launched two new security features that help to secure users data, not minding if the person is a Google product user or the regular Internet user that has nothing to do with Google services.

"Today, we're introducing two new updates that will keep your data secure, beyond just Google's sites and apps: Password Checkup, a Chrome extension that helps protect your accounts from third party data breaches, and a new feature called Cross Account Protection," Google announced in a blog post.

Google's new Chrome extension Password Checkup helps to ensure that users password is never compromised without their knowledge. This same similar feature is available on all Google products and apps.


Whenever a Google user's password has been exposed in a third-party data breach, Google automatically resets the password of the user account so as to reduce the risk of the account getting compromised.

However, with the new Password Checkup Chrome extension, this feature won't be restricted to just Google apps and services alone.

"We want to provide you with the same data breach protections for your accounts, beyond just Google apps and sites," Google said. "If we detect that a username and password on a site you use is one of over 4 billion credentials that we know have been compromised, the extension will trigger an automatic warning and suggest that you change your password."


In a nutshell, the Password Checkup Chrome extension aims at helping you re-secure accounts that were affected by data breaches.

In addition to the above, Google also launched Cross Account Protection to protect users while using apps that require Google account to log in.

When those other apps and sites have opted-in to Cross Account Protection, they will receive information in the events of account hijacking and or other security issues.

"With technologies like Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection, we're continuing to improve the security of our users across the Internet, not just on Google," Google said. "We'll never stop improving our defenses to keep you safe."

Google assured users of their privacy, saying that they have designed the security events to be extremely limited to protecting users privacy.