More than 700m email addresses, as well as a number of passwords, have leaked publicly thanks to a misconfigured spambot, in one of the largest data breaches ever. The number of real humans’ contact details contained in the dump is likely to be lower, however, due to the number of fake, malformed and repeated email addresses contained in the dataset, according to data breach experts. While there are more than 700m email addresses in the data, however, it appears many of them are not linked to real accounts. “Finding yourself in this data set unfortunately doesn’t give you much insight into where your email address was obtained from nor what you can actually do about it,” Hunt says. Video games reseller CEX notified customers that an online security breach may have leaked as many as 2m accounts, including full names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers.

Source: The Guardian August 30, 2017 09:45 UTC