Your personal information may have been leaked in the 'Mother of All Breaches' (MOAB), cybersecurity researchers have warned.
More than 26 billion personal records were exposed, in what researchers believe is the largest data leak ever.
Sensitive information was discovered from several sites, including Twitter, Dropbox, and Linkedin, on an unsecured page.
Researchers claim that this hack is extremely dangerous and could lead to a "tsunami" of cybercrime.
Bob Diachenko, owner of SecurityDiscovery, and researchers from Cybernews discovered the data breach on an unsecured web form.
The origin of the massive hack will likely never be discovered, but researchers suggest it may be a malicious actor, a data broker or a service operating large amounts of data.
Initial studies of the data indicate that it does not come from a new breach but is in fact a collection of previous breaches. Among the 12 terabytes of records, the researchers also noted that some were almost certainly duplicates.
However, the data breach is still very concerning given the sensitive nature of the information released.
“The data set is extremely dangerous as threat actors can leverage the collected data for a wide range of attacks,” the researchers said.
They say these attacks can include identity theft, sophisticated phishing schemes, targeted cyberattacks, and unauthorized access to personal and sensitive accounts.
The largest leak comes from Tencent's QQ app, a popular Chinese messaging app with 1.5 billion records in the breach. This was followed by Weibo, the Chinese social media platform, which recorded 504 million registrations.
Some of the other largest leaks came from MySpace (360 million), Twitter (281 million), Linkedin (251 million), and AdultFriendFinder (220 million).
The leak also included records from various government organizations from the United States, Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Turkey, and others.
If you are worried about your personal data being leaked in this hack, the most important thing you should do is update your passwords.
New features appearing in Telegram
Those in charge of the Telegram application announced the launch of a new update to the application, bringing with it new features for users.
With the new update, Telegram users can now know the exact time their messages sent in personal chats were read.
The new feature can be activated or disabled through the “privacy settings” in the application. If it is disabled, the user will appear that his message he sent to someone has been read through special tags, but he will not be able to know when the message was read.
This feature does not relate to users of Premium subscriptions in Telegram. Beneficiaries of these services, who have hidden the “message reading time” for others, can see the latest activities of users who have not disabled this option.
The new update for users of Premium subscriptions in Telegram also included a new feature, through which messages can be blocked from anyone who does not use this type of subscription in the application.