5 of the Biggest Password Leaks of 2017

2017 isn’t over yet but cyberbreaches are already approaching last year’s level, where billions of records were leaked and caused terrible headaches for the affected parties. So if you thought that was bad, you may have to think again; there’s still some time to go until the end of the year, and we’ve already seen hacks, ransom attacks, and leaks of gigabytes of data. Millions of records have been stolen, and an abundance of classified hacking tools set free into the wild, which has led to its own set of issues. So without further ado, here are five of the biggest leaks of 2017…

When notified about the flaw, Cloudflare reacted promptly and had mitigation in place within an hour, but what made things more severe was the fact that search engines were caching the leaked information. The flaw had been leaking data since September 2016, but Cloudflare did not find out about it until February 2017, so the damage is yet to be fully determined.

Onliner spambot leaks 700 million email addresses

In August 2017, security researcher Benkow discovered Onliner Spambot exposing a huge number of files containing personal information. Troy Hunt, the author of the HaveIBeenPwnedsite, wrote that the massive data leak contained 711 million unique email addresses, many of which were also accompanied by corresponding passwords. Troy even found his own real email address there, so there is a slight chance that yours could be there as well. Maybe it is a good time to change your email password?

What have we learned from this?

What really raises eyebrows, however, is how enabling two-factor authentication might have prevented some of these breaches. Still, while reading about these gigantic leaks, just take a moment and consider once again if you took the minimum steps to protect your account? Did you enable two-factor authentication? Remember, it’s not the same as two-step verification.

It’s easy to lose faith in technology when you hear about the frequency of security breaches, and knowing that you could be the next target is enough reason for concern. But unless you burn all the bridges to your digital life this struggle will always remain, and the best thing to do is to protect those online accounts with strong passwords, encrypt the data and use a password manager. It’s up to you to decide, however, what data to throw into the secure basket.