'Mother of all breaches'! In shocking cyber crime, 26 bn records leaked in largest data breach ever

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Cybercrime and data theft have become a common problem for organizations and the general public. Personal and sensitive data is being shared all over the internet by hackers without anyone's knowledge and new data breaches and invasions of privacy are recorded virtually on a daily basis. While organizations are taking strong cybersecurity measures, it is still not enough to protect people from data breaches. And things are getting worse. In the latest cybercrime, it has now been revealed that 26 billion records, which is approximately 12 terabytes of personal data and credentials from companies and organizations, were leaked. This data leak is a combination of multiple previous breaches and it has been dubbed as the 'Mother of all breaches'.

According to a Cybernews report, Bob Dyachenko a cybersecurity researcher and owner at SecurityDiscovery.com found that the breach contains 26 billion records. The owner of the records is said to be unknown, however, it is expected that the person could be a data broker or a cybercriminal who may conduct identity theft, scams, cyber attacks, and more. Dyachenko said, “The dataset is extremely dangerous as threat actors could leverage the aggregated data for a wide range of attacks, including identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.”

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The records of data not only contain credentials but more sensitive information that can be used to blackmail people and businesses. As per reports, the data is a compilation of previous as well as new data breaches which can be used to exploit people. The shocking revelation highlighted that the largest amount of data comes from Tencent QQ, a popular Chinese instant messaging app with 1.4 billion records. Additionally, millions of data records came from Weibo, MySpace, Twitter, and other platforms. Also, the data is collected from various locations including the US,