You might think your accounts on various sits are safe. I did. But do you use the same password in many places online? I did on a few sites (about 6). Well, if one of those sites gets hacked and your account password is known, it puts you at risk of having your account compromised on other sites that use the same email and password.
If you have an account on Site A, let's say linekdin.com, it has your email and password for that account. You also use your email on other sites, like Site B, which may be amazon.com, which also has a password for your account there. If Site A gets hacked, they know your email, and can use your email and password from Site A to try to log into Site B, C, D, etc.
The largest collection of hacked accounts was recently found for sale on a hacking site. The collection contained over 773 million accounts from various sites that have been hacked over the years. Some of the accounts were from previous known hacks, but some are knew with no previous knowledge of the hacks having been done.
The collection in 87GB, containing "360m MySpace accounts hacked in 2008 or the 164m LinkedIn accounts hacked in 2016", and 140m email addresses that have never been seen before. Troy Hunt, of Have I Been Pwned found the data, and has set up a tool on the site for you to know if you've been compromised on a site and need to change the password there and any other site that uses the same password.
"People take lists like these that contain our email addresses and passwords then they attempt to see where else they work."
"The success of this approach is predicated on the fact that people reuse the same credentials on multiple services. Perhaps your personal data is on this list because you signed up to a forum many years ago you’ve long since forgotten about, but because its subsequently been breached and you’ve been using that same password all over the place, you’ve got a serious problem."
Out of over 1 billion accounts, there are many passwords being reused, with only 21 million unique passwords:
In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords,” Hunt wrote, and “21,222,975 unique passwords”.
I recommend you go to the site and put in your email to see if you've been compromised. My main email got one hit for LinkedIn that was compromised a few years ago. I went to change my password there and on 6 other sites that had the same password. Hunt says it's good to use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass. That way you pick unique passwords and it stores them all for you.
I keep all of mine in a file on my computer. Most of my passwords are different, but I still had some that were the same. Oops. At least I have a file where I can know what I need to change ;)
Thank you for your time and attention. Peace.
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