As technology evolves, it becomes harder and harder to keep personal data private. From apps that use our personal information to hackers that steal it. Now a new major data breach was discovered. The data of millions of persons was stored on the MEGA service.
Since then the data from this service has been deleted, but this doesn’t change the fact that it was stored there for quite some time. It appears that there were more than 87 GB of data and 12,000 different files.
At the moment it is hard to identify the source for all this information, but it is believed that multiple sources were used in fact. The website Have I Been Pwned can be used to test whether you are a victim of a data breach. According to Hunt, the new data breach has 140 million new email addresses that weren’t on the website before.
“In terms of the risk this presents, more people with the data obviously increases the likelihood that it’ll be used for malicious purposes,” explained Hunt on his site. Therefore, it is recommended that you check your accounts and change your passwords.
Is it sensitive data?
If you are worried about what kind of information was stored there, you should know that it isn’t necessarily something new. “In some ways, it’s nothing new,” Hunt added “It’s a collection of credentials from old breaches that people have been passing around for years. But what makes it more serious is how broadly available it is to anyone who wants it and increasingly, how ubiquitous automated tools designed to use lists like these and break into accounts are.”
Nonetheless, if someone combined all that information into one database, this might be an indicator that the person of the group of persons has malicious intentions.
Nora Reynolds is a major in biology and a minor in Biological Basis of Behavior, writing about science in general. She also likes to try new gadgets and sports about the AI new era.
