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A huge collection of passwords, containing almost ten billion unique passwords, was leaked on a popular hacking forum. The Cybernews research team warns that this leak could seriously endanger users who tend to reuse.
Cybernews researchers found the biggest password collection with 9,948,575,739 unique passwords. It was posted as a file named rockyou2024.txt by forum user ObamaCare on July 4th.
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The user registered in May 2024 and had previously shared information from Simmons & Simmons law firm, AskGamblers casino, and Rowan College at Burlington County.
The team compared the RockYou2024 leak passwords with the data from Cybernews’ Leaked Password Checker. It showed that these passwords were from a combination of old and recent data breaches.
“In its essence, the RockYou2024 leak is a compilation of real-world passwords used by individuals all over the world. Revealing that many passwords for threat actors substantially heightens the risk of credential stuffing attacks,” researchers said.
Credential stuffing attacks can cause serious harm to users and businesses. A recent wave of attacks on companies like Santander, Ticketmaster, Advance Auto Parts, QuoteWizard, and others was due to credential stuffing attacks on their cloud service provider, Snowflake.
“Threat actors could exploit the RockYou2024 password compilation to conduct brute-force attacks and gain unauthorized access to various online accounts used by individuals who employ passwords included in the dataset,” the team explained.
Not the first rodeo:
The RockYou2024 compilation didn’t come out of nowhere. Three years ago, Cybernews wrote about the RockYou2021 password compilation, which was the biggest compilation at the time with 8.4 billion plain text passwords.
Attackers created the RockYou2024 dataset by searching the internet for data leaks. They added 1.5 billion passwords from 2021 to 2024, increasing the dataset by 15%.
The RockYou2021 includes millions of user passwords for social media accounts. It has expanded since the original data breach in 2009 to now include information from over 4,000 databases collected over more than 20 years.
The Cybernews team believes that attackers can utilize the ten-billion-strong RockYou2024 compilation to target any system that isn’t protected against brute-force attacks. This includes everything from online and offline services to internet-facing cameras and industrial hardware.
“Moreover, combined with other leaked databases on hacker forums and marketplaces, which, for example, contain user email addresses and other credentials, RockYou2024 can contribute to a cascade of data breaches, financial frauds, and identity thefts,” the team said.
How to protect against RockYou2024?
To protect users whose passwords have been exposed, individuals and organizations should employ mitigation strategies. The advice from the Cybernews research team is as follows:
Reset all passwords for accounts linked to the leaked passwords. We strongly advise using strong, unique passwords that are not used on multiple platforms.
Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) when available. It adds extra security by asking for more than just a password.
Use a password manager to create and save strong passwords securely. This helps to reduce the chance of using the same password for multiple accounts.
Cybernews will add RockYou2024 data to the Leaked Password Checker. This will let people check if their login information was exposed in the recent largest password leak.
RockYou2024 saw the release of another massive data leak in 2024. Cybernews found the Mother of all breaches (MOAB), which contained a staggering 12 terabytes of data and over 26 billion records.
