‘Mother of all Breaches’: 26 billion data records stolen from sites like X, LinkedIn

Dubbed as the "Mother of all Breaches" (MOAB), the leak is likely to be the biggest found till date.

Hyderabad: In a historic data breach, a massive leak of about 26 billion records, stolen from websites like X (Formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn was discovered by cyber security researchers.

Dubbed as the “Mother of all Breaches” (MOAB), the leak is likely to be the biggest found till date. A cyber security researcher Bob Dyachenko and Cybernews, discovered the leaked database consisting of sensitive information on an unsecured page.

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This data, discovered by Bob, who owns SecurityDiscovery.com and his team, runs up to 12 terabytes in size. The team believes that the database was compiled and put out by a data broker or a malicious actor.

The biggest chunk of the compromised data comprises of information from Chinese social media and gaming giant Tencent with 1.5 billion records in total. A further 504 million records are from Weibo, while 360 million records were found to be from MySpace, followed by 281 million from X.

Adobe, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Telegram and websites of several government bodies around the world are heavily impacted.

Reports suggest that the one who owns this data and put this out in public remains unknown. According to Cybernews.com, while the leaked database contains information from past breaches, it also holds new data which was not published anywhere, ever before.

“The stolen data is extremely dangerous as the threat actors could leverage it for a range of attacks, from identity theft to targeted cyber attacks,” say the researchers.

The team also said that the mass MOAB, could prove to be unprecedented as people reuse their usernames and passwords for multiple websites. The breach could be a “tsunami” of credential-stuffing attacks as the scope of attack is particularly dangerous when people use same credentials for different platforms, say experts.