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The Data Breach "Personal Stash" Ecosystem

Troy Hunt

That's the analogy I often use to describe the data breach "personal stash" ecosystem, but with one key difference: if you trade a baseball card then you no longer have the original card, but if you trade a data breach which is merely a digital file, it replicates.

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When Accounts are "Hacked" Due to Poor Passwords, Victims Must Share the Blame

Troy Hunt

The first one was about HSBC disclosing a "security incident" which, upon closer inspection, boiled down to this: The security incident that HSBC described in its letter seems to fit the characteristics of brute-force password-guessing attempts, also known as a credentials stuffing attack.

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Mother of all Breaches may contain NEW breach data

Malwarebytes

On January 23, 2024, we reported on the discovery of billions of exposed records online, now commonly referred to as the “ mother of all breaches ” (MOAB). Since then, the source of the dataset has been identified as data breach search engine Leak-Lookup. But it does nothing to enforce that restriction.

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Chart a course to the passwordless future on World Password Day

SC Magazine

Today’s columnist, Jasson Casey of Beyond Identity, offers a path for security teams to move off shared secrets and embrace a passwordless world. It’s World Password Day, do the company’s users still rely on passwords? Has the security team replaced them? Eliminate passwords.

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No, Spotify Wasn't Hacked

Troy Hunt

Very often, those addresses are accompanied by other personal information such as passwords. Clearly a Spotify breach, right? No, and the passwords are the very first thing that starts to give it all away. The attack is simple but effective due to the prevalence of password reuse. Billions of them, in some cases.

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The 773 Million Record "Collection #1" Data Breach

Troy Hunt

Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It's made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources.

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GUEST ESSAY: Until we eliminate passwords, follow these 4 sure steps to password hygiene

The Last Watchdog

Until biometrics or a quantum solution change our everyday approach to encryption, passwords remain our first line of defense against data breaches, hackers, and thieves. Proper password hygiene doesn’t require a degree in rocket science. 1) Create sufficiently-complex passwords. 2) NEVER reuse a password.

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