Today’s age of information technology offers almost endless possibilities. It can also be used by people with good or bad intentions. Therefore, the number cyber attacks is increasing drastically. Hackers use many ways to violate the privacy of Internet users. They are one of them brute-force attacks. That’s why it’s the latest escape 10 billion passwords very bad news. The internet portal informs about it Cybernews.
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Password leaks break records
On a popular hacking forum, a database containing the content of the early 10 billion passwords. For now, that’s about it the biggest leak passwords in the history of the Internet. File named “rockyou2024.txt” was published on July 4, contains up to 9,948,575,739 unique passwords. The user who posted the file described the leak as an “early Christmas.” The same user has already been responsible for several leaks from lesser-known and important sources in the past.
The good news is that the database does not only contain new passwords, but is also partially composed of older ones. So it’s about compilation of real used passwords worldwide. It follows on from earlier leaks. RockYou2021 was the original database that contained 8.4 billion passwords. RockYou2024 is only its addition, by about 15%. The precursor to RockYou2021 was a 2009 leak that contained tens of millions of passwords. Since then, the volume of the database has grown considerably, which is of course related to the fact that more and more people are using the Internet.
How can hackers use the database and how to protect yourself?
Today’s form of RockYou compilation is believed to be composed of more than 4,000 databases, collected over two decades. Hackers can use this information using brute-force attacks. The whole process works in such a way that the attackers, when trying to get into the account, try machine or passwords from similar databases automatically. Users who have one password assigned to several accounts are mainly at risk.
In order to protect yourself against this type of attack, it is recommended to use unique passwords, with special characters and numbers. They have a lower chance of being guessed. In addition, today it is quite common, e.g. setting two-factor authentication, which doesn’t just rely on a password. Use is also recommended password managerov to manage passwords.
If you want to check if your password has been leaked, you can do so on the site Cybernews. It is completely safe. The site will only tell you if your password has been leaked or in how many databases it is located.
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Source: www.mojandroid.sk
